peter wood natass

belated see NAss scholars

1619 rufo

see ginni

see affirmative action amicus

CASH FOR ECONOMISTS

CEI

bradley scaife koch $

ENSTROM

AGENDA 21

wegman

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booktv panel 221 hamilton inst peter wood

book 1620 // 1776united of somesuch BS?

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https://yyy.theguardian.com/law/2022/jan/28/clarence-thomas-supreme-court-affirmative-action-case-ginni-thomas

GUK

Who has more influence on supreme court: Clarence Thomas or his activist wife?

Justice’s wife, Ginni Thomas, sits on the board of conservative group that backs lawsuit seeking to end affirmative action, raising concerns it could present potential conflict of interest

Ed Pilkington

@edpilkington

Fri28 Jan 2022

Clarence Thomas, the hardline conservative supreme court justice, is facing calls for his recusal in the case over race-based affirmative action in college admissions that the court agreed to hear this week.

US supreme court will hear challenge to affirmative action in college admission

The case, which is being brought against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, is the latest potential conflict of interest involving Thomas and his wife Virginia Thomas. Ginni, as she is known, is a prominent rightwing activist who speaks out on a raft of issues that frequently come before the nation’s highest court.

A one-person conservative powerhouse, she set up her own lobbying company Liberty Consulting in 2010. By her own description, she has “battled for conservative principles in Washington” for over 35 years.

The challenge to the two universities’ race-conscious admissions policies is being brought by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA). Its leader Edward Blum has been a relentless opponent of affirmative action and voting rights laws.

His argument that race-based affirmative action is a quota system that discriminates against Asian students is framed with the supreme court’s newly emboldened rightwing majority in mind. A central player in that new six-justice conservative supermajority is Clarence Thomas, who is the longest-serving of the justices and at 73 will be the oldest once Stephen Breyer retires.

Justice Thomas’s influence has soared in recent months with the rightward shift of the court following Donald Trump’s three nominations, to the extent that some pundits now dub him the unofficial chief justice of the court.

SFFA’s lawsuit seeking to strike down affirmative action has received the enthusiastic backing of the conservative National Association of Scholars. It filed an amicus brief in support of the suit, accusing Harvard admissions officials of being prejudiced against Asian students and stereotyping them as “uninteresting, uncreative and one-dimensional”.

Ginni Thomas sits on the advisory board of the National Association of Scholars. Observers are concerned that her position with a group that has intervened in the affirmative action case could present appearances of conflict of interest.

Virginia ‘Ginni’ Thomas, wife of the supreme court Justice Clarence Thomas, watches Amy Coney Barrett take the constitutional oath in the White House on 26 October 2020. Photograph: Patrick Semansky/AP

Noah Bookbinder, president of the government ethics watchdog Crew,told the Guardian that while supreme court regulations may not legally require Thomas to recuse himself, there were serious questions to answer.

“Ginni Thomas is an advisory board member of an organization that has taken a very specific position on a case in front of her husband. That will make it hard for the public to be confident that he’s going to be totally unbiased.”

Bookbinder said that in the circumstances “the better course of action would be for him to recuse or for her to cease her involvement in that organization.”

The potential appearance of a conflict of interest over the Harvard case was noted in a recent investigation by the New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer that takes a deep dive into the overlapping interests of the couple. The article chronicles in devastating detail the many instances where Ginni’s political activism appears to present problems for the image and integrity of the court.

“Ginni Thomas has held so many leadership or advisory positions at conservative pressure groups that it’s hard to keep track of them,” Mayer concluded. “Many, if not all, of these groups have been involved in cases that have come before her husband.”

In the most troubling recent instance, Ginni Thomas lent her voice to Trump’s big lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. She was vocal on the subject in the buildup to the violent insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6 last year that led to the deaths of five people and left more than 100 police officers injured.

On the morning of the January 6 itself, Mark Joseph Stern of Slate reported, Thomas posted on her Facebook page words of encouragement for the “Stop the Steal” marchers in Washington. “LOVE MAGA people!!!!”, she said., “GOD BLESS EACH OF YOU STANDING UP or PRAYING!”

Soon after the insurrection, Thomas was forced to apologise to her husband’s former supreme court law clerks for comments she made privately to them that appeared to lament Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election. The remarks were sent to a private email list called “Thomas Clerk World”.

In the emails, disclosed by the Washington Post, she wrote: “Many of us are hurting, after leaving it all on the field, to preserve the best of this country. I feel I have failed my parents who did their best and taught me to work to preserve liberties.”

An even more direct intervention in the politics surrounding Trump and the big lie was made last December when Thomas joined 62 other influential conservatives in signing an open letter to the leader of the Republicans in the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy. It urged him to expel the Congress members Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger from the Republican party.

Their sin, the letter writers opined, was to serve on the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection. They described the committee as an “overtly partisan political persecution that brings disrespect to our country’s rule of law [and] legal harassment to private citizens who have done nothing wrong”.

Since the Capitol insurrection, the Department of Justice has arrested more than 725 defendants in relation to the storming of the building. Federal prosecutors have charged 225 with assaulting, resisting or impeding police officers, including over 75 charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily harm to an officer.

Last week the supreme court rejected attempts by Trump to block the January 6 committee from acquiring his White House records from the time of the attack. There was only one dissent from the bench to that 8-to-1 decision: it came from Clarence Thomas.

“Ginni Thomas’s activities are unprecedented in supreme court history in terms of a spouse engaging in issues that are constantly before the court,” said Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, a non-partisan group which advocates supreme court reform. “The appearance of impropriety is in itself impropriety – all the supreme court has is the trust of the public, and once you chip away at that you are in trouble.”

Roth added that Thomas’s comments in the days before January 6 were clearly problematic given her husband’s vote on the Trump documents. “It’s possible that the January 6 committee has emails between Ginni Thomas and administration officials from that day or the days leading up to it given how vocal she was. That’s definitely a place where Justice Thomas should have recused himself.”

Should the rightwing majority around Thomas use its newfound muscle to ban affirmative action, as is widely predicted, it would mark the negation of more than 30 years of settled constitutional law on the matter. What lies ahead bears strong resemblance to Roe v Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that made abortion legal which the court is probably poised to weaken or even overturn outright.

Mayer points out in the New Yorker that an amicus brief was filed in the supreme court case challenging Roe by Robert George who also sits on the advisory board of the National Association of Scholars alongside Ginni Thomas.

Roth told the Guardian that a simpler solution to the full recusal of Clarence Thomas from the affirmative action case might exist. That would be to remove the National Association of Scholars’ amicus brief.

“There is an easy way to deal with this perceived conflict of interest – strike the amicus brief,” he said.

It is established practice in all federal appeals courts, though not in the supreme court, that amicus briefs brought by anybody with a connection to a judge hearing a case are routinely thrown out.

The president of the National Association of Scholars, Peter Wood, told the Guardian that he knew of no conflict of interest relating to Thomas’s position on the advisory board. “Ms Thomas’s role is to provide advice to NAS in response to questions I put to her about NAS policy and initiatives. I have never discussed with her any NAS matter that was likely to come before the supreme court,” he said.

---

148 pp may 2024

Manufacturing_Backlash_final_0

Manufacturing Backlash Right-Wing Think Tanks and Legislative Attacks on Higher Education, 2021–2023 Isaac Kamola, Director, Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom American Association of University Professors ikamola@aaup.org

:{Introduction

Today higher education is under attack. Since 2021 we have witnessed what one scholar correctly called an “unusually brazen series of challenges to academic freedom,” unleashed by conservative activists and a “national-level political machine” closely aligned with the Republican Party (Brint 2023). Since 2021 more than one hundred and fifty bills have been introduced in state legislatures seeking to actively undermine academic freedom and university governance. This includes nearly one hundred academic gag orders seeking to ban the teaching of “critical race theory” (CRT) or other so-called “divisive concepts.” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has appointed partisan activists to the Board of Trustees of New College in Florida, }:

who fired the college president, replaced her with a political ally, denied tenure to five professors deemed outside the institutional mission, and began shuttering academic programs, starting with gender studies (Bartlett 2023; Pettit 2023). Tennessee, North Dakota, Texas, Florida, and North Carolina have passed laws dismantling institutional efforts to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) on college campuses. Republican lawmakers in Florida and Texas have sought to weaken tenure protections for faculty, making them more vulnerable to external pressure. Florida and North Carolina have undermined the accreditation process after accreditors raised concerns over the possibility of undue political interference in the states’ university systems.

Bills have passed in Florida and Ohio, and action taken by governing boards in North Carolina and elsewhere, to establish academic programs, centers, and whole schools designed to teach conservative content. Taken together, these bills constitute an evolving, interlocking, and intensifying effort by Republican politicians and well-funded think tanks to undermine academic freedom and university autonomy. This legislation is often understood as an effect of America’s highly polarized politics (see for example: Anderson 2023; Busteed 2023; Mintz 2021).

Since the election of Donald Trump, the argument goes, American politics have become overly partisan, with polarization affecting university campuses and college classrooms. As this white paper demonstrates, however, this legislation is largely the outgrowth of efforts by right-wing and libertarian think tanks, working closely with Republican politicians, to manufacture a culture-war backlash ...

NAS organizes the Civics Alliance, a project premised on the claim that civics education in K-12 and higher education has become a “recruitment tool of the progressive left,” as exemplified in the adoption of the 1619 Project (Civics Alliance n.d. b.). The Civics Alliance brings together educators and policymakers to promote a civics education that presents America as embodying “an exceptional heritage of freedom” (Civics Alliance n.d. a.). In reality, Civics Alliance is populated by members of conservative and libertarian think tanks.

Coalition members include Christopher Rufo (MI), Keith Whitaker (NAS), Ryan Williams (Claremont), Peter Wood (NAS), Jenna Robinson (Martin Center), Stanley Kurtz (EPPC), Scott Yenor (Claremont), George Leef, (Martin Center), and dozens of other individuals affiliated with rightwing publications, think tanks, foundations, or conservative activist organizations.22

The Civics Alliance monitors state-level legislation pertaining to K-12 civics curriculum. In addition to the GEA (described above), the Civics Alliance has written seventeen model bills focused on K-12 and higher education, including legislation giving states greater “accreditation autonomy,” requiring “syllabus transparency,” and mandating “intellectual diversity” (Civics Alliance n.d.).23

Between 2020 and 2022, NAS has received $2.7 million from eleven of the top twentyfive donors listed in Appendix 2, including the Sarah Scaife Foundation ($7.2 million) and the Bradley Foundation ($2.9 million) (DeSmog NAS). In addition to sharing funders, sitting on shared boards, and circulating each other’s content, many of the think tanks explored in this chapter are also institutionally connected through the SPN.

The State Policy Network (SPN)

Seven of the organizations discussed in this report are members of SPN (see Table 2.2). SPN creates strategic coordination between national think tanks—such as the Heritage Foundation and ALEC—and state-level think tanks, such as TPPF and IFF.

Started by ALEC in 1992, SPN originally included only a small handful of think tanks but rapidly expanded during the mid2000s. By 2022, SPN claimed sixty-three state-level think tanks partners (at least one in each state), more than ninety “national partners,” and more than sixty-six “state partners in key capacities like litigation, advocacy, and investigative journalism” (SPN 2023, 5).

The SPN specializes in connecting think tanks with donors and helping state-level think tanks implement local legislative strategies developed at the federal level. At the 2013 annual meeting in Oklahoma City, SPN president Tracie Sharp described SPN as an IKEA catalog of policy proposals and lobbying support. As summarized by Jane Mayer, Sharp told the audience that “instead of pictures of furniture arranged in rooms,” the SPN offers “state policy projects that align with the group’s agenda,” including opposition to “President Obama’s health-care program and climate-change regulations,” the reduction of “union protections and minimum wages,” cuts to “taxes and business regulations,” additional “voting restrictions,” and privatizing education” (Mayer 2013).

While national think tanks work to shape the national conversation, state-level think tanks take up such issues with local media, legislators, and publics. In so doing they produce state-specific content for state-specific audiences in coordination with national think tanks and activist donors. The composition of SPN’s board reflects their primary role of bringing donors together with state and national think tanks. The board includes representatives from conservative megadonors, including DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund, the Commonwealth

Foundation, the JM Foundation, the John William Pope Foundation, the Adolph Coors Foundation, Philanthropy Roundtable, the Roe Foundation, and Charles Koch’s Stand Together Foundation. The remaining board positions consist of representatives from think tanks, including the American Institute for Full Employment, the Bill of Rights Institute, and the Heritage Foundation (State Policy Network 2023, 30). The SPN also provides financial support

...

---

li 6 26

peter-wood-b569527

Former tenured professor of anthropology, college provost, and president of 501c3 non-profit, I am best known for two of my books, Diversity: The Invention of a Concept (2003) and 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project (2020). Since 2009 as president of the National Association of Scholars, I have helped to shape the national debate on public issues in American education, including the place of Western Civilization in the curriculum, the cost of college, the influence of China in American schools and colleges, the sustainability movement, the crisis of non-reproducibility in the hard sciences. I have a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Rochester; was a tenured member of the Anthropology Department at Boston University; and provost of The King’s College, NYC. I have published ten books and more than 500 articles in the scholarly and popular press and have given numerous invited lectures.

My most original work is in a pair of book titled "A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now" and "Wrath: America Enraged," in which I trace the changes in american culture through the lens of how Americans control their emotional expression. Broadly this is a story of socciety that has shifted from a strong ethic of emotional self-control to a strong ethic of emotional expressivity, both of which play out in how Americans handle their anger.

Though I have spent most of my professional career as someone attempting to reform American education against the prevailing tide of progressive values and political advocacy, I am primarily an anthropologist who is fascinated with both human variety and human commonality. I have also been deeply gratified by the attention to my writing, including the numerous short esays I've published in the popular press.

Publications (8)

Wrath: America Enraged

Encounter Books · Oct 12, 2021

This book re-examines the thesis on my 2006 book, A Bee in the Mouth, in light of the 2020 election and its aftermath.

1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project

Encounter Books · Apr 10, 2020

Diversity Rules

Encounter Books · Jan 1, 2020

A short book that covers the period from the history of the diversity concept from the 2003 Supreme Court decision in Gritter v. Bollinger through 2019. Diversity rules is the sequel to my 2003 book, Diversity: The Invention of a Concept.

Neo-Segregation at Yale

National Association of Scholars · Apr 29, 2019

Dion J. Pierre is the primary author of this study of Yale University stumbled from an earnest attempt in the early 1960s to enroll more minority students and integrate the campus to an eventual sustem of segregating students by race and ethniciity, just

scrape

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https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/04/sustainability-trend-costs-students-money-peter-wood/

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ref report

https://www.nas.org/blogs/dicta/sustainability_higher_educations_new_fundamentalism1

[pix po'd middle eastern looking guy; climate tshirt backwards]

“Sustainability” is a key idea on college campuses in the United States and the rest of the Western world. To many, sustainability is just a new name for environmentalism. But the word has come to mean something much larger: an ideology that demands new limits on economic, political, and intellectual freedom as the price that must be paid to ensure the welfare of future generations.

This report is the first in-depth critical examination of the sustainability movement in higher education. The movement, of course, extends well beyond the college campus. But the college campus is where the movement gets its voice of authority, and where it molds the views and commands the attention of young people.

Download the report (pdf): Sustainability: Higher Education':{s New Fundamentalism}:

Updated: With complete list of Mashey Papers

Computer scientist, entrepreneur, periodic DeSmogBlog contributor and “one of the good guys” John Mashey is the subject of an extremely favorable profile this week in Science.

Computer Scientist Goes on Offensive to Defend Climate Scientists

Eli Kintisch

See all authors and affiliations

Science 10 Jun 2011:

Vol. 332, Issue 6035, pp. 1250-1251

DOI: 10.1126/science.332.6035.1250

Science writer Eli Kintisch looks back over the last couple of years at the research and reports that Mashey has produced. Calling Mashey “an amateur” (which, on the question of climate science, he freely admits to being), Kintisch then looks for some journalistic “balance,” interviewing one person who is defensive and critical in the face of Mashey’s work (the confused and compromised physicist Will Happer) and one who is reassured and delighted (“hockey stick” co-author and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State, Michael Mann).

“Both sides can agree on one thing, however: Mashey has become one of the most visible of a new generation of climate warriors.”Kintisch canvases the reason that Mashey got involved in the first place - why he spends his retirement from designing computer systems by feverishly documenting “climate anti-science.”

“Mashey became upset that they (friends in the climate science community) were being attacked by bloggers and lawmakers and subjected to anonymous threats. ‘(Science historian) Naomi (Oreskes) is a friend, and she gets death threats. Mike Mann’s a friend, and he gets death threats. It pisses me off,’ Mashey says. ‘They get harassed and discouraged for doing a good job for everybody’s grandchildren.’”

So, with a computer programer’s zest for detail, Mashey wades through the flawed and contradictory material that constitutes the attack on climate science, producing voluminous and carefully credited reports that, in at least one recent case, result in the embarrassment of warriors on the other side of the argument and in a restoration of accuracy in the published record.

The Sciencearticle concludes:

“Mashey believes that vanquishing scientists’ foes will serve a higher purpose. ‘It’s up to some of the rest of us to help get these guys off your backs so you can do the science,’ he tells his scientist allies. He thinks discrediting their opponents also allows society to focus on the biggest problem: the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. ‘Goal number two is, try to help lessen the impact of climate antiscience on public policy before it commits the U.S. to be an increasingly bad place to live,’ he says.”

The Mashey Papers

1) Another Attack on Global Warming’s Scientific Consensus – A Case Study of Personal Harassment and Amplification of Nonsense by the Denialist PR Machine, DeSmogBlog, March 23, 2008, 40p.

Despite dismissing the work as “a bit patchy and nothing new,” Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, editor of the skeptic's journalEnergy and Environmentjournal, has published the work of the plagiaristDr. Klaus-Martin Schulte.

Dr. Schulte's “research” was first published last year on an industry-funded website called the Science and Public Policy Institute. Actually, it was excerpted in a long essay by the disingenuous Viscount Christopher Monckton (inset), who pronounced Schulte's paper serious, peer-reviewed science even while failing to admit his own part in its creation.

Following up on criticisms of Schulte's methodology and accusations that he had plagiarized earlier work by the oft-humiliated anthropologist Benny Peiser, the DeSmogBlog contacted Ms. Boehmer-Christiansen in September and asked how she could justify publishing Schulte's article.

In her response, dated Sept. 6, 2006, Boehmer-Christiansen said:

For your information, I have informed Dr.Schulte that I am happy to publish his own research findings on the effect on patients of climate alamism/'Angst'.

His survey of papers critical of the consensus was a bit patchy and nothing new, as you point out. it was not what was of interest to me; nothing has been published.

Sincerely

Sonja B-C

And as of September last year, nothing had been published. But the March issue of E&E proudly includes Schulte's work, pretty much unedited from the much-criticized version circulating last summer. We still await any actual research from Schulte on the effect of “alarmism” or “angst” on the health of his patients - or anything beyond his anecdotal reports that some among his patients find the threat of climate change (quite justifiably) anxiety inducing.

For the definitive review of both Schulte's unimpressive scholarship and the longer-running campaign to claim a legitimate ongoing scientific debate about global warming, see the attached paper by John R. Mashey. It is exhaustive and devastating - and pretty much every potential point of contention is backed up with links and direct references, creating a degree of transparency the likes of which appear to be entirely unfamiliar to Monckton-Schulte.

2) Science Bypass – Anti-science Petition to APS from folks with SEPP, George C. Marshall Institute, Heartland, DeSmogBlog, Nov. 11, 2009, 128p.

In the realm of silly petitions, manufactured by a small, agenda-driven group and leveraged to extend the fiction of a legitimate scientific controversy, no document has ever been studied to this degree.

Thanks to John Mashey, a technology consultant, entrepreneur, member of the American Physical Society and tireless researcher, this document lies completely exposed as another phony front group play for attention.

Mashey’s own explanation begins like this:

“The American Physical Society (APS) was petitioned by 206 people, about 0.45% of the 47,000 members, to discard its climate change position and declare decades of climate research non-existent. The Petition was “overwhelmingly” rejected, but this anti-science campaign offers a useful case study. The Petition signers‟ demographics are compared to those of APS in general.

Then, the social network behind the petition is analyzed in detail, person by person for the first 121 signers. This might seem a grassroots groundswell of informed expert argument with the existing position, but it is not.

Rather, it seems to have originated within a small network of people, not field experts, but with a long history of manufacturing such things, plausibly at the Heartland Institute‘s NYC climate conference March 8-10, 2009. APSphysicists can, do, and will contribute strongly to solving the 21st century‟s conjoined climate+energy problem, but this petition was a silly distraction, and rightly rejected. However, its existence was widely touted to the public.”

The whole, exhaustive document is attached. Fred Singer should be embarrassed.

For another take on this story, check out Adam Seigel’s article:APS says “In your face deniers!”

3) Crescendo to Climategate Cacophony - Behind the 2006 Wegman Report and Two Decades of Climate Anti-Science, DeSmogBlog, March 15, 2010, 185p. (CCC)

A new paper by the computer scientist and entrepreneur John Mashey, (attached) digs ever deeper (and in an increasingly well-organized way), into the morass of deception and disinformation that has characterized the recent climate conversation.

Mashey never uses the word “lies,” but somehow it seemed an appropriate illustration of what he finds underlying the recent campaign against climate science, scientists and anyone who respects their work.

This and Mashey’s previous paper point an unflinching finger at corporate front groups and free market think tanks that have worked so hard in the last two decades to spread confusion about climate science and to block public policy that would regulate the use of fossil fuels.

Mashey makes a compelling case that Congress has been misled in the process - which is an offense against the democracy that think tankers claim to love (in addition to being a felony).

For a visual reckoning of the kinds of think tanks involved, Mashey has populated a Google Map locating the major and minor players - although care should be taken to sort out those tanks that have the worst record in all of this - say, the George C. Marshall Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute and the Heartland Institute - from some that are just going along with the pack.

https://www.desmogblog.com/crescendo-climategate-cacophony

185 pp!

https://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/crescendo%20climategate%20cacophony%20v1%200.pdf

4) Strange Scholarship in the Wegman Report - A Façade for the Climate Anti-Science PR Campaign, DeepClimate, Sept. 26, 2010, 250p. (SSWR)

https://deepclimate.org/2010/09/26/strange-scholarship-wegman-report/

post by John Mashey

Strange Scholarship in the Wegman Report (SSWR)

A Facade for the Climate Anti-Science PR Campaign

This report offers a detailed study of the “Wegman Report”: Edward J. Wegman, David W. Scott, Yasmin H. Said, “AD HOC COMMITTEE REPORT ON THE ‘HOCKEY STICK’ GLOBAL CLIMATE RECONSTRUCTION”(2006).

It has been key prop of climate anti-science ever since. It was promoted to Congress by Representatives Joe Barton and Ed Whitfield as “independent, impartial, expert” work by a team of “eminent statisticians.” It was none of those.

A Barton staffer provided much of the source material to the Wegman team. The report itself contains numerous cases of obvious bias, as do process, testimony and follow-on actions. Of 91 pages, 35 are mostly plagiarized text, but often injected with errors, bias and changes of meaning. Its Bibliography is mostly padding, 50% of the references uncited in the text. Many references are irrelevant or dubious. The team relied heavily on a long-obsolete sketch and very likely on various uncredited sources. Much of the work was done by Said (then less than 1 year post-PhD) and by students several years pre-PhD. The (distinguished) 2nd author Scott wrote only a 3-page standard mathematical Appendix. Some commenters were surprised to be later named as serious “reviewers.” Comments were often ignored anyway. People were misused.

The Wegman Report claimed two missions: #1 evaluate statistical issues of the “hockey stick” temperature graph, and #2 assess potential peer review issues in climate science. For #1, the team might have been able to do a peer-review-grade statistical analysis, but in 91 pages managed not to do so. For #2, a credible assessment needed a senior, multidisciplinary panel, not a statistics professor and his students, demonstrably unfamiliar with the science and as a team, unqualified for that task. Instead, they made an odd excursion into “social network analysis,” a discipline in which they lacked experience, but used poorly to make baseless claims of potential wrongdoing.

In retrospect, the real missions were: #1 claim the “hockey stick” broken and #2 discredit climate science as a whole. All this was a facade for a PR campaign well-honed by Washington, DC “think tanks” and allies, underway for years.

Most people can just read the 25-page main discussion, but 200+ pages of backup text are included to provide the necessary documentation, as some issues are potentially quite serious.

For a quick download, read the Executive Summary (first six pages). Then, here is the complete report, including the main discussion and 200+ pages of appendices.

https://deepclimate.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/strange-scholarship-v1-02-exec.pdf

Strange Scholarship in the Wegman Report A Façade for the Climate Anti-Science PR Campaign John R. Mashey* 09/26/10, V1.0 This report offers a detailed study of the “Wegman Report”: Edward J. Wegman, David W. Scott, Yasmin H. Said, “AD HOC COMMITTEE REPORT ON THE „HOCKEY STICK‟ GLOBAL CLIMATE RECONSTRUCTION” (2006), republicans.energycommerce.house.gov/108/home/07142006_Wegman_Report.pdf . It has been key prop of climate anti-science ever since. It was promoted to Congress by Representatives Joe Barton and Ed Whitfield as “independent, impartial, expert” work by a team of “eminent statisticians.” It was none of those. A Barton staffer provided much of the source material to the Wegman team. The report itself contains numerous cases of obvious bias, as do process, testimony and follow-on actions. Of 91 pages, 35 are mostly plagiarized text, but often injected with errors, bias and changes of meaning. Its Bibliography is mostly padding, 50% of the references uncited in the text. Many references are irrelevant or dubious. The team relied heavily on a long-obsolete sketch and very likely on various uncredited sources. Much of the work was done by Said (then less than 1 year post-PhD) and by students several years pre-PhD. The (distinguished) 2nd author Scott wrote only a 3-page standard mathematical Appendix. Some commenters were surprised to be later named as serious “reviewers.” Comments were often ignored anyway. People were misused. The Wegman Report claimed two missions: #1 evaluate statistical issues of the “hockey stick” temperature graph, and #2 assess potential peer review issues in climate science. For #1, the team might have been able to do a peer-reviewgrade statistical analysis, but in 91 pages managed not to do so. For #2, a credible assessment needed a senior, multidisciplinary panel, not a statistics professor and his students, demonstrably unfamiliar with the science and as a team, unqualified for that task. Instead, they made an odd excursion into “social network analysis,” a discipline in which they lacked experience, but used poorly to make baseless claims of potential wrongdoing. In retrospect, the real missions were: #1 claim the “hockey stick” broken and #2 discredit climate science as a whole. All this was a façade for a PR campaign well-honed by Washington, DC “thinktanks” and allies, under way for years. Most people can just read the 25-page main discussion, but 200+ pages of backup text are included to provide the necessary documentation, as some issues are potentially quite serious. ...

5) “Strange Inquiries at George Mason University …and even stranger comments, DeSmogBlog, Jan. 04, 2011, 45p. (SIGMU)

https://www.desmogblog.com/gmu-still-paralyzed-wegman-and-rapp-still-paranoid

Isn’t it Time to Slam the Gate?

George Mason University continues to fritter away its reputation for academic integrity by failing to act on plagiarism chargesagainst Dr. Edward Wegman - but the indefatigable John Mashey has not rested in the long interegnum since the complaint was filed.

Mashey’s latest update is attached below and with his first edition, here. John recommends particularly the paranoic rantings of Dr. Donald Rapp (in the new Section 3) as well as Wegman’s own unfolding commentary (Appendix A 3), which continues regardless of a GMU directive that he not comment on his investigation until the beleaguered braintrust at his university decides to recognize the obvious - or cover up.

strange enq v2 pdf dl

6) Strange Tales and Emails: Said, Wegman, Sharabati, Rigsby (2008), DeSmogBlog, May 26, 2011, 17p. STaE.

littlemore

https://www.desmogblog.com/mashey-report-reveals-wegman-manipulations

The discredited Dr. Edward Wegman tried to blame a student for the plagiarism in a paper that has since been retracted from the journal of Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, according to emails released in a new report by computer scientist Dr. John Mashey(attached below).

The emails, originally obtained by USA Today reporter Dan Vergano, reveal that Wegman and his friend, CSDA Editor Dr. Stanely Azen, both tried to convince the publisher Elsevier to allow the discredited paper to stand, perhaps with an errata sheet attached as what Azen described as “punishment” for the Wegman team’s academic misconduct.

Mashey and the Canadian blogger DeepClimate have been the two most effective forces at discovering, analyzing and revealing the incorrect, plagiarized and academically incompetent work generated by Wegman, his collaborator and former student Yasmin Said, as well as other students including Walid Sharabati and John Rigsby in their ongoing attacks on climate scientists who contributed to the iconic “hockey stick” climate reconstruction graph (inset).

Earlier Mashey reports include Strange Scholarship in the Wegman Report and Crescendo Climategate Cacaphony, both of which leverage DeepClimate’s research and then canvas in extraordinary detail the connections and manipulations that mark the Wegman campaign. The retraction of the CSDA paper is the first obvious result of Mashey and DC’s painstaking scholarship. This new report is yet more evidence that more dramatic punishments may still be in store for the Wegman team and for the Republican legislators (such as Joe Barton) and functionaries (including Barton’s staffer Peter Spencer) who originally engaged Wegman to launch the hockey stick attack.

7) Strange Falsifications in the Wegman Report, DeSmogBlog, May 27, 2011, 12p. SFWR

New Mashey Report Drills into Academic Misconduct

The 2006 Wegman Report to Congress, already under investigation for extensive plagiarism, also appears to be guilty of falsifications, misrepresentation and frabrications that could give rise to a charge of academic misconduct, according to a new report by computer scientist and entrepreneur John Mashey (attached, below).

Mashey and the Canadian blogger DeepClimate have analysed Wegman extensively in the past, primarily for the plagiarism of which Wegman is so clearly guilty. But Mashey digs deeper in the current report, questioning whether the numerous errors, oversights and misrepresentations in the report can be explained by inadvertence or incompetence, or whether Wegman and his prinicpal co-author Yasmin Said were intentionally distorting the information they were plagiarizing and, in the process, pointedly misrepresenting science.

The Wegman Report was commissioned by Congress as an “investigation” into a controversial “hockey stick” graph that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had used prominently in an effort to illustrate the reality of climate change. Although Edward Wegman’s report was highly critical of that graph, later analysis (mostly by DeepClimate) showed that, in mounting the attack, Wegman had extensively cribbed one of the graphs own authors, Raymond Bradley.

What Mashey now demonstrates is that, in addition to misrepresenting Bradley’s words as his own, Wegman also twisted, misrepresented or completely changed the meaning of some of Bradley’s work, without explanation or reference to any other source that might justify the manipulations.

As Mashey says - showing an extensive analysis of Wegman against the original: “Bradley is methodically weakened, silently contradicted or even directly inverted ….”

These errors could have been attributable to “mere serious incompetence and poor scholarship, including inability to understand a textbook well enough to summarize it correctly,” Mashey says. But he later adds, “I think most of this is purposeful.”

Mashey’s analysis is compelling. He reveals minor, but annoying changes, such as when Bradley is talking about a “strong temperature signal” available from tree rings and Wegman, in the midst of a purloined paragraph, amends Bradley’s text to add the word “relatively” - as in a “relatively strong temperature signal.”

Indeed, having relied overwhelmingly on Bradley’s text to present himself as an expert on the use of tree rings to create a reconstruction of historic temperatures, Wegman then changes a final sentence to arrive at a conclusion exactly opposite to Bradley’s own. Bradley, explaining both the strengths and weaknesses of using tree rings, says this:

“If an equation can be developed that accurately describes instrumentally observed climatic variability in terms of tree growth over the same interval, then paleoclimatic reconstructions can be made using only the tree-ring data.”

Wegman, who had added confusing or “confounding” references in the midst of several earlier paragraphs, removes Bradley’s positive conclusion and adds instead this flatfooted statement, instead:

“Thus tree ring proxy data alone is not sufficient to determine past climate variables.”

Finally, Mashey demonstrates that Wegman was also guilty of that most obvious of undergraduate cheats: bibliography padding - the inclusion of numerous irrelevant references to give the impression of careful scholarship.

Mashey writes: “Bibliography-padding can also be a form of fabrication, and 40 of 80 references (in Wegman) are never cited, leading one to wonder if the (Wegman Report) authors had actually ever studied them. Many are clearly irrelevant or found in dubious sources inappropriate for such a report. A tabloid writer’s 1987 ozone article in a fringe technology magazine is listed as an “Academic paper.” It cannot possibly be relevant.”

As usual, Mashey’s own report is painstakingly annotated and he generously credits the previous excellent scholarship by DeepClimate. Wegman, who must surely have been humiliated by having a related paper thrown out of a scholarly journal - also for plagiarism - must surely stand accountable soon, lest the reputation of George Mason University be permanently damaged by its tolerance of this poor and political performance.

PRESENTATION AND VIDEO

The Machinery of Climate Anti-Science, April 7, 2011, University of Victoria, B.C., Canada.

che1 ~ sustain

https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/tyranny-or-theft-part-1/29661

june 16, 2011

Tyranny or Theft? Part 1

Over the weekend I attended two conferences: one in Philadelphia on “Business Ethics and the Eighth Commandment” and one at UCLA titled “Big Footprint: Is Green the New Tyranny?” They didn’t quite rhyme, but they were consonant. The Eighth Commandment—“Thou shalt not steal”—turned out to be a surprisingly rich source of reflection on the financial crises of our time and the moral order needed to foster the kind of prosperity that benefits everyone. The “Big Footprint” conference centered on the thesis that efforts to combat global warming are really a stalking horse for those wish to curtail private property rights and democratic freedom.

These two conferences, though quite different in tone and spirit, were both expressions of discontent with contemporary ideas about how we should conserve and use resources. I want to thread these two conferences together as a way of sharpening my own critique of the sustainability movement. To make this more digestible, I’m breaking this post into three parts.

Both conferences were suffused with the view that free markets are a key to human flourishing, and that the right to own property is the indispensable basis of constructive trade. The Eighth Commandment conference was co-sponsored by the Center for Christian Business Ethics and the Westminster Theological Seminary, which gave it a decidedly Protestant flavor. The UCLA event was sponsored by the American Freedom Alliance, which describes itself as “a non-political, non-aligned movement which promotes, defends and upholds Western values and ideals.” The AFA’s topics include “the Islamic penetration of Europe,” academic freedom, media bias, and missile defense. Non-political it may be, but it is not likely to be mistaken for the AAUP.

I had a good deal of time on my flight home to reflect on the points of convergence and how all this bears on the future of higher education. These conferences, back to back on opposite coasts, were dramatic contrasts in outlook. The business-ethics conference was in spirit apologetic. It defended “proper Godly business thinking and behavior,” but allowed that business often falls far short of that ideal. One session towards the end dealt with a well-intended business venture in Africa that failed because of the embezzlement and self-dealing by the African partners. Biblical principles met tribal self-interest, and tribal self-interest triumphed. How are the blessings of the free market going to be achieved in the global community when confronted with obstacles like that? Pessimism was not about to carry the day, but there was a element of humility in the proceedings, perhaps best voiced by Dr. Jack Templeton, whose address on “Morality in Finance,” emphasized that the way “to gain freedom from the ego is through listening and learning.”

The UCLA conference, on the other hand, was rambunctious and rather assertive in its diagnoses and prescriptions. It aimed at kicking out the props holding up bad science, worse economics, and really awful politics.

Big Footprint

The tone of “Big Footprint” was set by the opening keynote address by Christopher Monckton—Lord Monckton—a hereditary peer and deputy leader of the UK Independence Party who is an outspoken skeptic about anthropogenic global warming. “Skeptic” is perhaps an understatement in his case.

Lord Monckton is an agile, nose-tweaking, derisive foe of those who believe that significant global warming has resulted from human contributions of CO2 to the atmosphere. He is more caustic still towards those who believe that carbon reductions, cap and trade, windmills, and the like can be deployed to achieve any meaningful reduction in greenhouse gases. Let’s say Lord Monckton’s keynote address was not an attempt to find the redeeming features of a flawed movement, or to discover a winsome approach to those who are ambivalent about the alleged threat of global warming.

Several other speakers took similar tough-minded approaches, though none were so wry in delivery.

Another keynote speaker, Michael Shaw, an attorney and CPA from Santa Cruzand board member of Freedom Advocates, focused on one of the initiatives that came out of the Rio Earth Summit in 1992: the Sustainable Development Agenda 21, which is a kind of comprehensive planning document that has filtered down from President Clinton’s 1993 Executive Order that created a President’s Council to implement it, to state and local efforts. Mr. Shaw observed that Agenda 21 makes property rights, in principle, subordinate to community interests. Those community interests, in turn, are defined by what might be called an excessive fondness for decisions made by unelected bureaucrats.

Mr. Shaw’s bête noire is a scheme called the “Reserve and Corridor System to Protect Biodiversity,” which is a plan to cluster the human population in relatively dense settlements and return much of North America to “little or no human use.” One way this program advances is through the contributions of the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI, pronounced ICK-lee), and Mr. Shaw had stern warnings about ICLEI’s mischief too.

To the question posed in the Big Footprint conference subtitle, “Is Green the New Tyranny?” the conferees offered a yeti-sized YES. It may surprise some of my readers that I have doubts about this.[namely?]

comments:

kimbruce • 6 years ago

To get a sense of the "Big Footprint" conference, readers might find reading about "Lord Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley" (keynote speaker for the conference) on wikipedia. I won't say more as it's clear from there his enthusiasm about suing those who oppose him.

It's also interesting that Michael Chrichton was listed was being on a panel at the conference. The annotation "(dec'd)" after his name presumably referred to the fact that he died in 2008. Perhaps the enthusiasm of the attendees was enough to raise the dead!

JohnMashey kimbruce • 6 years ago

Actually, Monckton *threatens* suits and investigations.

However, Peter Wood's approving report did forget to mention Monckton's use of swastikas.

See

http://scienceblogs.com/del...

and just today, we learn:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/e...

Monckton insists he is a member of the House of Lords (he is not and never has been), but that is no more out of touch with reality than his climate commentaries

peterwwood • 6 years ago

Indeed, the highlight of the conference was sitting down with the spectral Michael Chrichton and discussing the afterlife. You had to have been there.

---

pt 2

https://www.chronicle.com/**blogs/**innovations/tyranny-or-theft-part-2/29664

june 16

Tyranny or Theft? Part 2

In part one of this three-part post, I set up a comparison of two conferences that presented contrasting free-market approaches to the question of the most beneficial way for humanity to make use of economic resources. “The Big Footprint” conference at UCLA assessed the sustainability as essentially a “tyranny” in the making. I view the sustainability movement as something that generally overstates its claims and detracts from more important educational goals, but “tyranny?” I am not sure that is the best way to describe the mix of intellectual shortcuts, personal bullying, and other aggressive tactics we have seen so far. The Green Police are a campus nuisance, but they aren’t yet in control of everything and I doubt they ever will be.

The Campus Sustainability Movement

The root-and-branch denunciation of the sustainability movement I saw at the Big Footprint conference was not altogether new to me. I’ve read Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them, (2009) by Steve Milloy, the publisher of JunkScience and co-founder of the Free Enterprise Action Fund. Milloy was among the speakers, and he exemplifies the critique of sustainability as a response to a “green” political movement that threatens property rights, erodes economic growth, and compromises political freedom.

My own view is that whatever power the green political movement may attain is based on the enthusiasm of millions of Americans for its ideals, and that those who dislike the prospects of green political power need to spend some time understanding where that enthusiasm comes from. To a fairly large extent, it comes from schools and colleges.

I have been concerned for several years about the rapid propagation on campus of the sustainability movement—but I have steered clear of whether global warming exists and how the matter has played out in the larger political arena. Regardless of what one thinks about global warming or climate change, the sustainability movement in higher education is a phenomenon in its own right.

In April this year, the National Association of Scholars presented a statement synthesizing what we see as grounds for critical scrutiny of the movement. We made it clear that we are not against saving energy, but that “sustainability” has come to mean a lot more than that. It is a doctrine with a peculiarly blinkered view of scarcity. It emphasizes maximal conservation of resources and government regulation to the near exclusion of other approaches.

Sustainability’s advocates often malign “progress” and technological innovation (except that which produces the will-o’-the-wisp “green jobs”). The movement often merely assumes the things it needs to show, e.g. that developed countries have unsustainable levels of consumption. And in its campus incarnation, the sustainability movement has proven itself an enemy to free inquiry.

Enstrom, Updated

As it happened, one of the academics who found himself on the blunt end of the sustainability movement’s muscular dislike of dissent was at the conference: James Enstrom. I wrote about his case on Innovations in April, in “The Smog of Reprisal.”

Enstrom’s offense was to catch out the California Air Resources Board (CARB) in an act of bureaucratic hubris. CARB ignored Enstrom’s epidemiological work to the effect that “fine particulate pollution” had no significant effect on human mortality and relied instead on another study that asserted the opposite. Enstrom discovered that the rival study, riddled with scientific errors, was written by a man with fake credentials. But he found himself opposed by some of his UCLA colleagues—and promptly non-reappointed to the position he had held at UCLA for 34 years.

Enstrom was eager to talk with me, but not about his personal situation. What matters more to him is that another scientific committee has completed a draft report on “fine particulate pollution” that essentially reproduces his results. [note no cire/ref] Better still, the report in its draft form is clearly written from a hostile perspective. The authors strain to reach conclusions that might vindicate CARB but are stuck with data that vindicates Enstrom. There is surely something sweet in watching your opponents reluctantly conceding that you were right all along.

It is hard to say whether this will persuade CARB to relinquish its hastily established regulations in this area, but it does underscore that the sustainability movement on campus plays hardball with those who fail to fall quietly in line with its edicts. Respect for academic freedom? Not so much.

When I wrote about the Enstrom case earlier, some of the comments illustrated the problem. Enstrom, I was told, had no academic freedom to begin with since he was a research professor, not a tenured member of the faculty. Enstrom, I was told, could be ignored because he had once received funding from Big Tobacco (he had not). The games of blame-the-victim, imagine-every-possible-exculpation-for-the-victimizers, and look-for-loopholes were instantly activated.

But none of that persiflage changes the basic situation. An honest scientist spoke up against scientific fraud and was fired as a consequence. The retro-engineering of the situation by his department to make it appear otherwise was full of the fine particulate matter of dissimulation.

Addendum

My comment about Enstrom’s funding has elicited a lengthy ad hominem attack on him in the comments section from Chuck Kleinhans. Because my reply includes some links to external documents that cannot be accessed in the comments section, I post it here:

Kleinhans’ (“Chuckkles””) attack on the integrity of Dr. Enstrom is essentially a smear. I regret having opened the door for this by writing above that, “Enstrom, I was told, could be ignored because he had once received funding from Big Tobacco (he had not).” I should have written, “He does not.”

Dr. Enstrom did receive tobacco industry during a portion of his scientific career at UCLA, but he no longer receives such funding. His tobacco industry funding was used to fund high quality, peer-reviewed epidemiologic research that is entirely valid and that made a significant contribution to understanding the etiology of tobacco-related diseases. Dr. Enstrom has fully addressed previous criticism of this tobacco industry funding and his tobacco-funded research in an October 10, 2007 peer-reviewed paper, “Defending Legitimate Epidemiologic Research: Combating Lysenko Pseudoscience“ and in April 20, 2009 Science-Based Medicine comments on the book “Hyping Health Risks.”

This ad hominem attack has no relevance to Dr. Enstrom’s research and analyses showing no relationship between fine particulate air pollution (PM2.5) and total mortality in California. The scientific validity of Dr. Enstrom’s PM2.5 research is supported by the new detailed findings (particularly Figure 22) in the June 9, 2011 Draft Final Report by Dr. Michael Jerrett.

In principle, I think it a poor idea to respond to Chuckkles, whose wild provocations and gratuitous slurs are appended to numerous Chronicle posts. I make an exception because he has attacked the good name of an innocent man who has already suffered considerable injustice.

comments:

huckkle • 6 years ago

Wood claims here that Enstrom did not receive money from Big Tobacco. But this is contradicted by published background by Sourcewatch:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/...

Enstrom was given the opportunity to respond. In those responses he never denies that he received Big Tobacco funding. I, of course, can't know what he told Wood in conversation when they met, but given Wood's consistent misdirection when challenged, a great deal of skepticism is in order.

Further, Wood fails here to address the key issue of Enstrom losing his research position: did he in fact fail to gain sufficient continued research funding to underwrite his being kept on the faculty or not. Enstrom doesn'st want to talk with Wood about his "personal situation." Might we suspect this is because revealing the facts would support his losing his job?

Here's the Sourcewatch material (with links on their site to footnotes backing up their claim:

:{:{Enstrom is a controversial figure who has accepted funding}:

from the Philip Morris

tobacco company and the Center for

Indoor Air Research (a tobacco industry front group),}:

and subsequently published research that contradicted scientific consensus

about the health effects of secondhand tobacco smoke, also known as

environmental tobacco smoke, or ETS. [1]

Tobacco companies have used Enstrom's work to help confuse

the public about the causative link between tobacco smoke and disease. For

example, a 1992 British American

Tobacco (BAT) handbook titled Smoking Issues Claims and Responses

counsels BAT employees to publicly deny that smoking causes lung cancer,

claiming that statistics have failed to be conclusive on the question. The

manual cites Enstrom as one of the "eminent scientists" who has

"questioned the evidence on smoking and lung cancer because of its many

inconsistencies." Pages 8-9 of

170 page manual

:{:{In 1997 Enstrom wrote to Richard Carchman, Director of}:

Scientific Affairs at Philip Morris, asking for $150,000 to study the link

between environmental tobacco smoke and mortality rates. Enstrom wrote, "A}:

substantial research commitment on your part is necessary in order for me to

effectively compete against the large mountain of epidemiologic data and

opinions that already exist regarding the health effects of ETS and active

smoking." [2]

Also in 1997, Max Eisenberg, Director of the tobacco industry-funded CIAR, held

discussions with Enstrom and epidemiologist Geoffrey Kabat of the State

University of New York in Stoneybrook, about the possibility of their

collaboration.[3]

The same year, Philip Morris granted Enstrom $150,000 (in the form of two

payments of $75,000) to fund a project titled "Relationship of low levels

of active smoking to mortality." [4] [5]

In 2003 Enstrom and Kabat published an article in the

British Medical Journal (BMJ) titled, Environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco

related mortality in a prospective study of Californians 1960-98. The study was

based on a dataset collected by the American Cancer Society for the purpose of

measuring the health effects of active smoking rather than passive smoking.

Enstrom's article was controversial for its finding that secondhand tobacco

smoke was less harmful than previously believed. Enstrom and Kabat wrote that

"The results do not support a causal relation between environmental

tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality, although they do not rule out a

small effect. The association between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke

and coronary heart disease and lung cancer may be considerably weaker than

generally believed." [6]

:{:{BMJ received approximately 150 "rapid response"}:

letters to the article, most of which sharply criticized Enstrom's findings. [7] One of the respondents}:

was Michael J. Thun, Vice President and head of epidemiology and surveillance

:{research at the :{American Cancer Society, who pronounced Enstrom and Kabat's}:

study "fatally flawed" because "no information was obtained on}:

sources of exposure to environmental tobacco smoke [in the dataset] other then

smoking status of the spouse," and "tobacco smoke was so pervasive in

the United states in the 1950s and 1960s that virtually everyone was exposed at

home, at work or in other settings." Enstrom responded by saying Thun had

been unable to "identify a single error" in the study and that his

"attack should be seen for what it is--an attempt to discredit work that

is at variance with the position he's committed to." [8]

:{:{In 1999 the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) brought a}:

massive lawsuit against the major U.S. cigarette manufacturers alleging that

the companies had collaborated in an elaborate, decades-long conspiracy to

deceive the American public about the health effects of active smoking and

secondhand smoke. In August 2006, Judge Gladys Kessler of the U.S. District

Court in Washington D.C. ruled against the companies. The court's Final Opinion

contains a detailed timeline (starting in Section 5, paragraph #3781, on Page

1380) describing communication between Philip Morris and Enstrom to produce the

2003 BMJ study, and describes how the American Cancer Society had repeatedly

warned Enstrom that using its CPS-I data in the manner he was using it would

lead to unreliable results. The court's Final Opinion cites the 2003

Enstrom/Kabat study as a significant part of the companies' conspiratorial

enterprise against the American public. [9]}:

Chuck Kleinhans

---

PW:

This attack on the integrity of Dr. Enstrom is essentially a smear. I regret having opened the door for this by writing above that, "Enstrom, I was told, could be ignored because he had once received funding from Big Tobacco (he had not)." I should have written, "He does not."

Dr. Enstrom did receive tobacco industry during a portion of his scientific career at UCLA, but he no longer receives such funding. His tobacco industry funding was used to fund high quality, peer-reviewed epidemiologic research that is entirely valid and that made a significant contribution to understanding the etiology of tobacco-related diseases. Dr. Enstrom has fully addressed previous criticism of this tobacco industry funding and his tobacco-funded research in an October 10, 2007 peer-reviewed paper, "Defending Legitimate Epidemiologic Research: Combating Lysenko Pseudoscience" (http://www.epi-perspectives... and in April 20, 2009 Science-Based Medicine comments on the book "Hyping Health Risks"(http://www.sciencebasedmedi....

This ad hominem attack has no relevance to Dr. Enstrom's research and analyses showing no relationship between fine particulate air pollution (PM2.5) and total mortality in California (http://www.arb.ca.gov/lists....

The scientific validity of Dr. Enstrom's PM2.5 research is supported by the new detailed findings (particularly Figure 22) in the June 9, 2011 Draft Final Report by Dr. Michael Jerrett

(http://www.arb.ca.gov/resea....

Peter Wood

---

chuck:

Wood claims my remarks are “a smear” and “ad hominem.” Nonsense. I pointed out a factual error in Wood’s discussion (Enstrom did receive Big Tobacco money for his research that was used to back up lobbying and propaganda against restricting second hand smoking). Wood has corrected his mistake: good. But he can’t leave it there. He goes on to claim that a hot button article is “entirely valid.” I pointed out that there was a controversy about it with researchers on both sides. I am not professionally qualified to pass judgment on the scientific merits of each position, and I’m pretty sure Wood isn’t either. “Entirely valid”? not for me to say, nor Wood. And by the way “peer-reviewed” indicates a basic sufficiency in following protocols; it does not mean “true” or “entirely valid.” Science proceeds by discussion.

More revealing is Wood’s avoidance, once again, of the core issue in Enstrom losing his faculty position. Did he in fact fail to meet the floor of grant awards to secure his position for another term? If so, that explains why he was not kept on. No big conspiracy here, just following the well known policies. I don’t know the answer. Wood isn’t telling us; not is Enstrom. Why so reticent?

There are a few of larger and more substantive issues here. One has to do with the very nature of research professorships which depend on the faculty member having to endlessly chase grants to keep one’s job. Part of the modern research university, yes. But: a good idea? Something that can easily distort research subject matter and goals? And the built in seduction/motivation to seek money from interested parties? Likely to shape one’s research agenda to a funder’s values and priorities? The recent example of the London School of Economics being embarrassed when its receipt of Libyan funds and flowery declarations of Ghaddafi’s new “progressive” and “liberalizing” face came up against the realities of a civil war might give us all something to think about. How about it, Peter Wood? What insight do you have into these issues?

Chuck Kleinhans

---

Enstrom, I was told, could be ignored because he had once received funding from Big Tobacco (he had not).

Huh?? How do you expect people to believe you when you so cavalierly just flat out lie? Well, if you're not lying, then at least you've done very poor due diligence. (Fascinating question: Where did you get that information? Who told you he hadn't??) Secret tobacco documents tell us that of course he's received tobacco funding, and more than once, and a considerable amount.

Did anyone say accuse Enstrom of taking tobacco money RIGHT NOW this minute? Of course not, no relevance whatsoever. I'm shocked you can't just admit, "OK, I messed up here," and be done with it.

The Enstrom/Kabat 2003 BMJ study itself says (even as it minimizes Enstrom's involvement with tobacco cos):

"Competing interests: In recent years JEE has received funds originating from the tobacco industry for his tobacco related epidemiological research because it has been impossible for him to obtain equivalent funds from other sources. . . . JEE and GCK have no other competing interests. They are both lifelong non-smokers . . . "

Sound weird to you? Sure does to me. Please cite any other study that:

1) excuses its funding source by saying it _had_ to be used, because impliedly more reputable others wouldn't fund it ("The only reason we went to the Mafia was because no one else would fund our study on how great the Mafia is.");

and

2) cites a personal attribute or lack therof as a verification of scientific rigor and independence. ("The authors of this study on alcoholism only tipple occasionally, and even then, seldom touch 'Night Train.'")

pt 3

Tyranny or Theft? Part 3

I’ll conclude this three-part post on the sustainability movement and two recent conferences that critiqued it.

Assembling the Pieces

I cited the Enstrom case as a concrete instance of the much larger problem of the moral inflation of the sustainability movement. In the precincts of the higher education, and in education at all levels, sustainability tends to deal in certitudes, and it has very little patience for the unconvinced or the under-enthusiastic. Its proponents sometimes seem to think it is an ethical duty to punish dissenters, and the movement is chock full of sentiments about the obligation to get everyone on board.

Not long ago, Sustainability: The Journal of Record held a roundtable of campus sustainability activists and asked them about “student engagement.” Sean Miller, director of education for the Earth Day Network, said he would like to see steps “guaranteeing every singled student that goes though the higher education institution has somehow engaged or is knowledgeable about sustainability.” Kristy Jones, manager of Campus Climate Education & Action for the National Wildlife Federation, thought integrating “the message of sustainability into freshman orientation” would be a good step. Claire Roby, carbon-accounting coordinator for Clean Air-Cool Planet, emphasized the importance of “allowing a nonprofit to interact very closely with students or staff members” as way “to hold campuses accountable.”

There is no mistaking how well-meaning Mr. Miller, Ms. Jones, and Ms. Roby are in saying such things. And it is partly on that score that I found myself on the outskirts of the discussion at Big Footprint.

The analysis there of the movement emphasized its economic and political imperatives. At one level this is largely accurate. The sustainability movement is heir to the disappointments of European socialists and ex-communists. It sprang into existence in 1987 with the report of the UN Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by Norwegian prime Minister Gro HarlemBrundtland. The connection to land-use planning, the commitment to extra-territorial regulation, and the readiness to by-pass democratic procedure are in the DNA of the sustainability movement. A great deal of its mischief, as in the persistently misleading pronouncements from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, stems from the grounding of the sustainability movement in attitudes far removed from American political and cultural traditions.

But the traction that the movement has gained in the United States doesn’t have much to do with spontaneous admiration for UNESCO bureaucrats or international elites who jet around the world promoting massive transfers of wealth to impoverished nations. Those ideas eventually find welcome in the minds of students who have worked their way deep inside the concept that they are now “citizens of the world.” The movement’s mass appeal lies elsewhere.

Sustainability is first of all an emotional summons—one that combines elemental fears with hopes of salvation. It draws heavily on Judeo-Christian imagery and a secularized, but not very deeply disguised, Christian narrative of a good creation corrupted by human sin and headed for disaster, which might be staved off through sufficient acts of penitence—like giving up the internal combustion engine, not to mention bottled water and cafeteria trays.

The religious narrative is interwoven with other strands of Western mythology. It isn’t hard to find Rousseau’s imaginary picture of man uncorrected by civilization filtering into the dreams of sustainatopians. The movement expresses a longing for lost innocence, for the “re-enchantment” of nature as one of its proponents puts it, and for an easily captured high ground on which alienation from mass consumerism can be played out as though it had positive content. Somehow we can feel better about ourselves if we believe the world is going to wrack and ruin because of the heedlessness and greed of others.

Stealing Time

Mine is a cultural analysis of sustainability. The movement thrives in higher education because it has connected with generational identity: It is the movement of a self-conscious cohort that finds moral leverage in it against their parents, who are castigated for their wasteful lifestyles. And it thrives because it is a substitute religion that demands a manageable degree of expiation, self-sacrifice, and guilt. The economic and political stuff are the caboose. The engine is belief.

“Thou shalt not steal” is embedded in this movement on both sides. The sustainability adepts see human use of resources as essentially theft—and the depredations of the past must be made good before we can be absolved.

But the movement’s critics see theft as well: theft of property rights and theft of political autonomy. That’s the main thing I took away from the Philadelphia conference, where one of the speakers illustrated the pernicious effects of collectivism by circulating an impressive aerial photograph of Scottsdale, Ariz. On one side of a boundary lay the barren desert of collectively owned tribal land, and on the other the lush and expensively improved holdings of private land owners.

The Eighth Commandment resonates through contemporary life in surprisingly complex ways. It is an edict in universal form, meant to apply to all people at all times. The anthropologist Robin Fox suggests in his new book The Tribal Imagination that the Ten Commandments might be best interpreted as the rules which a formerly nomadic tribal people needed in order to become a settled, civilized people who could live in some degree of amity with their neighbors.

That civilizational challenge remains, perhaps even more complexly demanding in our fluid, multicultural world. Sustainability offers a plaintive version of the idea that we can rid ourselves of these frictions through a more perfect purging of our acquisitiveness. It offers only a fantasy, however, no matter how much it dresses itself up as “scientific consensus.” Higher education at some point will have to shrug it off and get back to the work of seeing the world as it is. When it comes to education, indulging apocalyptic fantasies and dreams of Edenic restoration is just another form of pilfering, even if the students are willing accomplices.

comments eh on trays

https://www.nas.org/articles/the_pressure_of_group_thought

aug 2015

Academic “consensus” is in the news. Stetson University professor of psychology Christopher Ferguson, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, recently gave a run-down on how the American Psychological Association supposedly compromised itself by manipulating a task force into endorsing harsh interrogations of prisoners. Ferguson says the APA “crafted a corrupted ‘consensus’ by excluding those who might disagree.”

Which is, of course, exactly how the dodgy “climate consensus” works too. “Climate consensus” is the rhetorical club wielded by the proponents of the theory of catastrophic man-made global warming. On campus—and in many other venues—to express the slightest doubt about the theory is to risk a “climate consensus” drubbing. “Consensus” in this sense is pretty close to what John Adams warned in 1788 could become “the tyranny of the majority.”

The U.S. Constitution was meant to forestall that tyranny; but Americans also found other ways to hold back the eagerness of proud majorities to impose their views on everyone else. The doctrine of “academic freedom” is one of those majority-busting concepts. An idea isn’t necessarily right merely because lots of people like it. Keeping a space open for dissenting views is always a good idea.

And that’s why when someone pulls the “consensus” card out of the deck, it is probably time to demand a new shuffle.

Interrogations

Christopher Ferguson tiptoes around the fake climate consensus. His essay, after all, was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which flinched when theclimate thugs came out a few years ago, and these days it never deviates from its consensus crouch. Ferguson genuflects before the global warming consensus: “of course” it is “based on the quality of the data.” He fails to mention that the data and the theory have never matched and the discrepancy has grown into a yawning chasm in the last eighteen years of the “pause” in global warming. But let’s not pause.

Ferguson does have other examples. He cites the 1986 Seville Statement in which twenty scholars convened by UNESCO serenely declared that human nature has no “genetically programmed” tendency towards violence. As Ferguson notes, the science since Seville hasn’t been friendly to that particular consensus.

When Consensus Collapses

Ferguson’s examples of the “consensus” of one historical moment collapsing in the next is intriguingly brief. I suspect he or the editors of the Chronicle did not want to remind readers of just how many consensus idols once cherished by academics have crumbled into dust. Or, being cherished, are held together by the intellectual equivalent of Elmer’s Glue-All.

Once upon a time, Margaret Mead’s view of “culture” enjoyed the status of consensus in anthropology. Culture, to Mead, was an Open Sesame that permits any social arrangement we care to imagine and abolishes the constraints of human nature. Mead-ism still has its supporters, especially among advocates of outré arrangements such as polyamory and transsexual rights, but it has long since dissolved into intractable controversy. No well-informed observer within anthropology would claim that there is a “consensus” about the quality of Mead’s field observations or the breathtaking generalizations she drew from them about human sexuality.

For many years it was an article of faith—and consensus on the American left—that Alger Hiss had been wrongly accused of spying for the Soviets and lying about it under oath. Hiss was accused in 1948, convicted of perjury in January 1950, and sentenced to five years in prison. For the rest of his life (he died in 1996) Hiss maintained his innocence and enjoyed fervent support from liberals as well as leftists. But shortly after that, Ron Radosh, Harvey Klehr, and John Earl Haynes, and other researchers in the archives of the former Soviet Union turned up irrefutable evidence of Hiss’s guilt.

When a “consensus” dies, die-hard supporters remain. Believers in Hiss’s innocence remain. Perhaps there is something in human nature, overlooked by Margaret Mead, that causes some people to stick with a sinking ship even after all that is left is a half-submerged deck chair.

Consensus after consensus has sunk beneath the waves, but it is a big ocean. There was room in it for the Cold War revisionist thesis that blamed Stalin’s aggression on the West, and room too for the War on Poverty and for Affirmative Action. Those ideas, of course, are not dead, but they are shadows of the “consensus” once claimed on their behalf.

None of these examples peep out from Ferguson’s Chronicle article, but he does offer the telling observation that consensus-style arguments in the social sciences are especially bad. Ferguson observes that such consensus “has usually been declared despite continuing debate among scholars.” An example or two might have helped. What about the question that got Larry Summers defenestrated at Harvard? Why are there so few women at the highest levels of mathematics and theoretical sciences? The “consensus” answer—discrimination against women explains everything—was indeed imposed “despite continuing debate.” We are in much the same territory with the new “consensus” on the percentage of college women who are assaulted.

Ferguson’s own example of phony consensus is from research on the effects of video games on children. I’ll take his word that the field is rife with flimsy claims dressed up as “consensus.” The more interesting question he raises is why the word “consensus” carries such weight.

To answer that, it helps to have a sense of how the word climbed into popular use.

Different Seeds

If you go to Google’s famous Ngram Viewer, which tracks the frequency with which words appear in books year by year for many centuries, you will find there was virtually no “consensus” in the English-speaking world in the 17^th century. An apparent “consensus” boomlet between 1625 and 1630 was caused by the printing of a Latin text comparing the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox views of the teachings of Peter on church doctrines of matrimony. The word was still Latin for the most part, though a 1675 English dictionary offers “consension,” meaning “agreement,” not to be confused with “conseminate” which is “to sow different Seeds together.”

Consensus didn’t escape Church Latin and some specialized medical meanings until the end of the 19^th century. A sober little essay on “Pitfalls in English” that appeared in the Journal of the Canadian Bankers’ Association in 1897 (why there?) calls out the phrase “consensus of opinion” as a vogue usage that has replaced “the general opinion.” The Canadian bankers, alert to pitfalls, observed that “consensus of opinion” is redundant because “consensus” all by itself means “agreement in opinions” and “agreement of opinions of opinions is not a very neat expression.”

After that the term rumbles along for half a century at a low level of usage. The Adoption of the Consensus System is the Only Remedy for Political Chaoshuffs the title of a 1927 tract. The Boy Scout magazine, Boys’ Life, in 1933 describes its selection of football players for the all-Scout all-America team as “the consensus of five nationally famous all-America selections.”

The point at which the word takes off is 1950. Duke University Press that year published Toward Consensus for World Law and Order, which seems to have been a pro-UN screed popular with what we now call Peace Studies folk. In the July 1950 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists the eminent Michael Polanyi warned that “Scientific consensus can properly emerge only by a discussion based on the mutual grounds of the same scientific convictions. It cannot be negotiated in the manner of a contract, nor decided by any voting procedure.” By the late 1950s, “consensus” is clearly in vogue as an academic term cropping up in all manner of topics, from Richard Hofstadter’s history of the progressive era, The Age of Reform, to such oddities as sociologist Gresham Sykes’ study of a maximum security prison in New Jersey, where he writes about “the hard core consensus expressed by the members of the captive population.”

Culture Wars vs. Consensus

After that, “consensus” talk just grew and grew, the upside-down image of consensus reality, which withered and cracked. All through the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, as the Culture Wars took shape and America split apart into identity groups that wanted nothing to do with the old “melting pot,” American writers turned out books and articles by the thousands extolling “consensus.” I won’t try to follow this ascent in detail. I don’t think there is any one book or author who stands as the redwood tree in the forest of ordinary consensus celebrants. But there are curious further developments. Around 2000—the year George W. Bush was elected—“consensus” began a slow decline in popularity, and an even sharper decline starting in 2007. But then the Obama years bring a consensus come-back. Google finds a paltry 876,000 “consensus” documents in 2008. It zooms to 1.8 million in 2009, then climbs steadily to 9.6 million by 2014.

Permission to speculate? I see some evidence that “consensus speak” is largely the rhetoric of the left. Consensus is the agreement or the solidarity that the left seeks to declare when it sees itself as able to dominate. The left isn’t so interested in consensus when it is out of office or sees its rivals on the rise. The right seems far less interested in consensus, nationally or internationally. Probably that’s because the right tends to see politics as the balancing of competing interests rather than a winner-take-all game.

Be that as it may, the American infatuation with consensus does seem to vary inversely with our actual level of social agreement. Consider a divisive issue that marks as well as anything the divisions of the culture war: abortion. In the Google Ngram world, the chart of increased use of the word “consensus” is a close match with the use of the word “abortion.” They rise and fall together.

Distrusting Consensus

The left today is infatuated with “consensus” as a tool that can be used to ostracize views it would rather not have to debate. If there is a consensus on “Black Lives Matter” or “Climate Change,” the matter is settled. The herding instinct of the collectivist left is stroked by consensus. The right has some of these herding impulses too, but it also has a much stronger strand of individualism, and for individualists the pronouncement that something is backed by consensus is a warning label. That label says, “Probably contains unwarranted assumptions, unfounded factual claims, and an aversion to considering alternative ideas.”

But liberals don’t always like consensus, and there is one particular consensus they heartily dislike: the broad agreement among Americans in favor of America itself. In her book, Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (2008), Stanford University historian Wendy L. Wall, for example, works hard to demolish “the façade of consensus” in the United States, which “concealed an ongoing context involving many different groups.” When the opposite of consensus is social diversity, naturally academic sentiment is on the side of diversity. Diversity trumps in every context except diversity of ideas.

There was a time, however, when liberal sentiment was decisively on the side of national consensus. The historian and political scientist Clinton Rossiter famously described Parties and Politics in America (1960) as founded on consensus. And he seemed to think this was a good thing: “The American consensus is unique in its virility and broad appeal”; America has “an acceptable consensus among the elites in every part of the land”; and “The blessed fact of the American consensus forces the parties to share many of the same ideas. The blessed fact of American diversity forces them to be selective about the ideas they may wish to emphasize at any one time or any one place.”

It bears pointing out that the “diversity” Rossiter was writing about was the political culture of the states. “Diversity” as a code word for ethnic identity groups had not yet been born. By the end of the 1960s, however, the old consensus was dead—and so was Clinton Rossiter, who committed suicide at Cornell in the aftermath of the seizure of the student union by heavily armed black students. Rossiter’s attempts to temporize with violent racial grievance had left him few friends and nowhere to stand. Sic transit consensus.

Consensual Relations

“Consensus” seems to be in decline. Christopher Ferguson’s Chroniclearticle is part of the evidence, and so too is the freezing up of campus debate on contested issues. As quite a few observers have now pointed out, we have moved into a period in which students themselves are attempting to silence dissenting opinions. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s thorough account in the Atlantic, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” takes us right to the heart of a movement, “driven largely by students, to scrub campuses of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense.” This is “consensus” thinking in action. If “everyone” agrees, we can just disregard the ignorant or stubborn few who actually don’t agree.

That might seem like “consensus” on the rise rather than in decline, but the logic of cultural change is always full of irony and inversions. The self-coddling students imposing a new Victorian etiquette on campus and the viciously enforced pseudo-consensus on global warming are two different kinds of admission that “the tyranny of the majority” in higher education is breaking down. That tyranny works most effectively when it is quietly assumed. If the proponents have to use sharp elbows and uppercuts, the pretense of “consensus” is demolished.

Should we want consensus to rule in higher education? At a certain level, yes. We need consensus on the framing principles: searching for truth; listening to opposing points of view; demanding evidence for assertions; asking skeptical questions even—or perhaps especially—when skepticism is unwelcome; learning how to respond to substantive arguments; and grasping that ad hominem attack is not the way civilized people respond to those with whom they disagree. And the individual scholarly disciplines need some practical consensus. We need to agree on what the mass of a kilogram is and whether class meets today or tomorrow. But we can actually get by rather well in the midst of strong disagreements about fundamental questions. Does God exist? What is human nature? Is American exceptionalism valid? It is not that the answers don’t matter. It is that getting to the answer by imposing a “consensus” is bound to have bad results for a free people who need to learn how to think for themselves.

This article originally appeared on Minding the Campus on August 27, 2015.

Peter W. Wood is President of the National Association of Scholars. He has a PhD in Anthropology and is listed as the author of two books published by Encounter Books.

In the role of National Association of Scholars President he has espoused climate contrarianism, but it is unclear that he has any background in the climate science field.

Background and experience

"He is a graduate of Haverford College, Rutgers University, and the University of Rochester, from which he received a Ph.D. in anthropology in 1987. He previously served as provost of The King’s College in New York City, and as associate provost and the president [John Silber ]’s chief of staff at Boston University, where he was also a tenured member of the anthropology department."^[1]

Climate science and policy

Expertise is unclear

It is unclear whether Dr. Wood has any academic background or experience that would qualify him to hold informed views about the field of climate science.^[2]

Writings are dismissive

In June 2011, in the Chronicle of Higher Education weblog, posts appearing under Wood's byline included a 3-part attack on sustainability^[3],^[4],^[5] and a post^[6] casting doubt on human-caused climate change and dismissing the work by John Mashey and others to expose and counter the climate denial PR effort.^[7]

Articles and resources

References

:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Peter Wood. Carolina Journal. Retrieved on 2011-07-12.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Dr. Wood has declined to provide this information so far, saying he will take the request "under advisement." - Ahaynes, 2011-07-14; no further information, two weeks later
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Peter Wood (2011-06-16). Tyranny or Theft? Part 1 - Innovations. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved on 2011-07-10. “Tyranny or Theft? Part 1”
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Peter Wood (2011-06-16). Tyranny or Theft? Part 2. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved on 2011-07-10. “Tyranny or Theft? Part 3”
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Peter Wood (2011-06-16). Tyranny or Theft? Part 3. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved on 2011-07-10.
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Peter W. Wood (2011-06-30). Bottling Up Global Warming Skepticism. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved on 2011-07-10. “"At 15, P.T. Barnum showed what he was made of...Of course, man-made global warming is just one exhibit in the contemporary higher-education circus."”
:{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Tim Lambert. Peter Wood's double standard on plagiarism. Deltoid. Retrieved on 2011-07-10.

External resources

Bottling Nonsense – Peter Wood and the National Association of Scholars, 34pp report by John Mashey, 2011-08-01

CHE punked? blog for quick response // jrnls?

Bottling Up Global Warming Skepticism

At 15, P.T. Barnum showed what he was made of. He shrewdly traded some trash for a peddler’s wagon full of green bottles. Then he opened a lottery, sold a thousand tickets, and handed out the empty bottles as prizes.

Barnum eventually grew rich with his museum, his circus, and his spectacular coup in bringing the singer Jenny Lind to America, but he longed for something else. As his biographer Neil Harris put it, Barnum sought “approbation”—

Swindlers had existed for a long time, but none had the effrontery to call themselves philanthropists or to make money from revelations of their own cunning and deceit.

The public loved his spectacles but a certain class of people deplored his ethics.

I am not sure why contemporary higher education hasn’t more forthrightly claimed P.T. Barnum as its true progenitor. His influence surely outshines Thomas Jefferson, Mark Hopkins, Charles Eliot, Nicholas Murray Butler, Robert Maynard Hutchins, or Clark Kerr.

Contemporary higher education has its own “greatest show on earth” tactics, but fondness for spectacle isn’t the heart of Barnum-ism. Barnum’s genius was in matching his entertainments to public yearnings and the vagaries of taste. He was deeply democratic, attuned to the press, and knew that he could use incredulity in his own favor. As Harris put it, “an exhibitor did not have to guarantee truthfulness: all he had to do was possess probability and invite doubt.”

But let’s put aside these vacant thoughts and turn to some serious news. Sciencereports that retired computer scientist Dr. John Mashey is attempting to patch the tattered reputation of “hide the decline” Michael Mann, the climate scientist whose famous “hockey stick” chart shows exponentially increasing global temperatures in the near term. Mashey has been, as he puts it, “trying to take the offense” against global warming skeptics by flyspecking their publications. “You hope they make a mistake,” he says, and when they do, he pounces with demands that journals retract whole articles. Some journals indeed have. As Science puts it, “His critics say Mashey is more interested in destroying his foes than in debating the issues.” Professor Mann is extolling his efforts at “exploring the underbelly of climate denial.”

Mashey’s crusade brings to mind an article published in the journal Critical Inquiry back in 2004 by French social theorist Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Latour, who had been a key intellectual force in efforts to undermine the authority of modern science first by insisting that science is “socially constructed,” and later by deploying the obsessive obscurantism of “ethnomethodology,” had come to the abrupt realization that by undermining the authority of science, he had inadvertently helped those who were skeptical of global warming. Since he knew(on what authority?) that man-made global warming was a scientific fact, it now struck him as crucial to combat “excessive distrust of good matters of fact.”

But how is this to be done? I suppose Mashey offers an instructive example of one way to put “excessive distrust” of authority back in the green glass bottle. Making the bottle the only safe refuge from abuse might work on a limited scale, but it isn’t really attuned to our sense of fair play. We don’t need perfect assurance in our scientific theories but we do need to believe that the scientists are doing their best to get to the truth.

As P. T. Barnum taught us, skepticism is tricky business. “Perfect and absolute conviction in exhibits made them less valuable,” says Harris summarizing Barnum’s perspective. “Spectators required some hint of a problem, some suggestions of difficulty.” The trick is to evoke just the right amount of skepticism, and not too much difficulty. A little too much either way and the game is over.

Of course, man-made global warming is just one exhibit in the contemporary higher-education circus. If it grows stale, we have others.

https://www.desmogblog.com/nas-president-peter-wood-wrong-dishonest-or-hopelessly-compromised

aug 2011

New Mashey Report Disrobes Climate Disinformer

What would cause a senior anthropologist such as Peter Wood to stagger outside his field of expertise and launch a bitchy, personal and error-ridden attack on a climate scientist and his defender? Wrong-headedness? Ideological blindess? Great wads of Richard Mellon Scaife’s cash? What?

Well, the question must be rhetorical, unless the President of the National Association of Scholars chooses to answer it himself. According to his fields of study, Wood is an “expert” in art, aesthetics, Catholocism and culture. He neither claims nor can demonstrate the tiniest academic mastery of atmospheric physics or any other aspect of climatology.

Yet he has used his launching pad as president of the NAS (suspiciously rendered with the same acronym as the National Academy of Sciences) and a podium at the Chronicle of Higher Educationto try to dismiss both Michael Mann and John Mashey as huckster fellow travellers of P.T. Barnum.

As the attached report demonstrates, that was a mistake. Because Wood doesn’t fare at all well when someone turns the investigatory camera on him. Wood has long had a tendency to question climate science or to laud whacky climate change deniers such as Christopher Monckton or Fred Singer, but his most recent outburst followed an excellent short feature of John Mashey by the journal Science. As Wood says, “Science reports that retired computer scientist Dr. John Mashey is attempting to patch the tattered reputation of ‘hide the decline’ Michael Mann, the climate scientist whose famous ‘hockey stick’ chart shows exponentially increasing global temperatures in the near term.”

Beyond correctly identifying Mashey as a computer scientist, Wood appears to be wrong on all fronts. Far from being “tattered,” Mike Mann’s reputation has been hardened in the fires of hell. Despite a pitched attack on his character and scientific output going back nearly a decade, every inquiry appears toexonerate his personal behavior and reaffirm the quality of his science. I suspect Mann’s work has been cited more in the last six months than Wood’s has in his entire career.

Neither was it Mann who penned the famous (and famously misquoted) “hide the decline” line from the stolen East Anglia emails. And the important part of Mann’s hockey-stick chart was not the exponential increase in global temperature: you can see that in any rendering of the actual instrumental record. The defining work in Mann’s graph (and in every other climate reconstruction that has been done since) is the demonstration that, before humans started pouring carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we had enjoyed at least a thousand years of remarkable climate stability (constituting the shaft of the hockey stick that came before the exponential blade).

So Wood either doesn’t understand any of this or doesn’t want us to. And Mashey, a ferociously energetic researcher, has created a 34-page report pondering Wood’s own frailties and setting forth some possible explanations of why the (less credible) NAS president could be so far off the rails.

There is, of course, ideology. Although the NAS declines to identify itself as a bastion of “conservative” thought, it seems to spend a surprising amount of time digging its nose into issues that are more of interest to its well-healed conservative funders than those that are centrally reflected in the organization’s own mission statement. (I dare you to find much “reasoned scholarship” or “civil debate” in Wood’s original salvo or in any of the back-and-forth commentary that followed.)

Mashey also points to the coincidence that the big donors to the (less credible) NAS are also suspiciously generous to organizations such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the George C. Marshall Institute - two of the most prominent climate science denying think tanks in the country. Now, it could be purest chance that all these organizations share a passion for spreading climate confusion. Just as it could be possible that the devastating weather events that have marred America so far this year are entirely unrelated to climate change ….

You also have to admit the possibility that Dr. Wood just isn’t that smart - that he is doing all this work in purest good faith, but that he has the terrible misfortune to have consistently and repeatedly got all the details wrong.

Certainly, it was a case of misfortune that he attacked Mashey, or else the encyclopedic evidence of Wood’s connections and previous protestations would not have been gathered in this handy reference.

Alas, when you look at the clownish Monckton, the discredited Singer or Steve Milloy and, now, the unfortunate Peter Wood, you have to wonder that the oily barons can’t afford more impressive champions for their increasingly incredible cause.

https://gofossilfree.org/national-association-of-oil/

Update: After posting this piece yesterday, the National Association of Scholars got in touch with us to push back on some of the assertions I made below, especially on the structure of NAS and its funding.

The (admittedly short) research I’d done on NAS pulled up a description from SourceWatch that said “according to its 2009 IRS Form 990 (Part VI Section A), the Association doesn’t have members (line 6), members don’t elect the officers (line 7a), and the decisions of the governing body are not subject to members’ approval (line 7b).” NAS clarified that they have “several thousand faculty members, administrators, students, and citizens, who hold meetings with state affiliate chapters, receive copies of our quarterly journal, and in other ways interact as an association.” Fair enough , that counts an association in my book.

NAS also pushed back on the assertion that they’re “industry” funded. According to NAS, the Scaife Foundation is a donor, but that “funding had nothing to do with and was in no way conditional on our work on sustainability or divestment.” I’ll take them at their word on that one, although it remains a valid point that the other recipients of Scaife funding (Hoover, AEI, Heritage, etc.) are indeed a who’s who of climate misinformation.

The NAS didn’t push back on its record of going after sustainability in higher education (their president did in fact publish a book referring to it as higher education’s “new fundamentalism”). That history doesn’t disqualify them from commenting on divestment, but it does give you a useful sense of their ideological bent . An honest thanks to NAS for the clarifications. At this point, we can agree to disagree–and keep making a forceful case for our side. -----

Today the New York Times is hosting another “Room for Debate” on the efficacy of the fossil fuel divestment movement. Here at Go Fossil Free, we love seeing a healthy discussion about divestment. Debates about the carbon bubble, the moral responsibility of institutions to act, the financial and political impact of divestment, etc. all help spur the campaign forward, hone our strategies, and generate a key ingredient for all social change: heat.

But good debate needs to be honest and transparent. Today the Times stumbled by not making it clear that one of the contributors to its debate, the National Association of Scholars, is in fact neither an association, nor a group of scholars: it’s an industry funded right wing think tank.

According to SourceWatch, the NAS is a “non-profit organization in the United States that opposes multiculturalism and affirmative action and seeks to counter what it considers a ‘liberal bias’ in academia.” The group’s primary funder is the Sarah Scaife Foundation, an offshoot of the Mellon industrial, oil, aluminum and banking fortune. Other groups supported by Scaife foundation funding in include the Heritage Foundation, The Hoover Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute, all prominent right-wing think tanks who’ve been at the forefront of spreading misinformation about the climate crisis and opposing action to address it.

The NAS has its own nasty track record of intolerance and anti-environmental advocacy. The “association” has been a long time opponent of multiculturalism and affirmative action. Back in 2012, for example, a writer associated with the group argued in the *Wall Street Journal*that “activist” professors at the University of California were “indoctrinating” students and having a “corrupting” effect on the university.

More recently, the NAS has lobbied against the “broad imposition of the ‘sustainability’ agenda on university activity and campus life,” (they’ve also opposed the “neglect of character education” at colleges, but who really knows what’s that’s all about). The President of NAS, Peter W. Wood, wrote a book called Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism,which admittedly I haven’t read, but judging from the title I’m assuming he’s not a fan of the concept. In a blog for theHuffington Postlast April, Wood wrote that universities that warned their students about climate crisis were “dangerously intemperate” and were likely under the influence of “enviro-radicals” like 350.org founder Bill McKibben.

Little surprise then that the association is on the attack against the divestment movement. As the movement has grown in size, the fossil fuel industry has increasingly gone on the offensive, trying everything from launching animations criticizing the effort (look up, ” it’s worth a good laugh) to trying to make divestment illegal in Australia.

Methinks the industry protests too much. When fossil fuel front groups are so quick to point out how divestment isn’t working, you can be pretty sure it’s having an impact. As we continue to debate the importance of the growing divestment campaign, let’s make sure to be clear about where each party is coming from.

https://www.nas.org/projects/sustainability_report

https://www.nas.org/images/documents/NAS-Sustainability_Executive_Summary.pdf

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY “Sustainability” is a key idea on college campuses in the United States and the rest of the Western world. To the unsuspecting, sustainability is just a new name for environmentalism. But the word really marks out a new and larger ideological territory in which curtailing economic, political, and intellectual liberty is the price that must be paid now to ensure the welfare of future generations. This report is the first in-depth critical study of the sustainability movement in higher education. The movement, of course, extends well beyond the college campus. It affects party politics, government bureaucracy, the energy industry, Hollywood, schools, and consumers. But the college campus is where the movement gets its voice of authority, and where it molds the views and commands the attention of young people. While we take no position in the climate change debate, we focus in this study on how the sustainability movement has distorted higher education. We examine the harm it has done to college curricula and the limits it has imposed on the freedom of students to inquire and to make their own decisions. Our report also offers an anatomy of the campus sustainability movement in the United States. We explain how it came to prominence and how it is organized. We also examine the financial costs to colleges and universities in their efforts to achieve some of the movement’s goals. Often the movement presents its program as saving these institutions money. But we have found that American colleges and universities currently spend more than $3.4 billion per year pursuing their dreams of “sustainability” at a time when college tuitions are soaring and 7.5 percent of recent college graduates are unemployed and another 46 percent underemployed.1 In addition to the direct costs of the movement, we examine the growing demands by sustainability advocates that colleges and universities divest their holdings in carbon-based energy companies without regard to forgone income or growth in their endowments. What makes “sustainability” so important that institutions facing financial distress are willing to prioritize spending on it? In this report, we examine that question. Because the idea of “anthropogenic global warming”—or “climate change”—is so closely interwoven with the sustainability movement, we devote a chapter early in the report to laying out the arguments on both 1 The basis of the $3.4 billion estimate is given in Chapter 5 of this report. For the unemployment rate see: Heidi Shierholz, Alyssa Davis, and Will Kimball, “The Class of 2014: The Weak Economy Is Idling Too Many Young Graduates,” Economic Policy Institute, EPI Briefing Paper #377, May 1, 2014. The Shierholz study uses the term “underemployed” to mean “working part-time” and calculates that 16.8 percent of recent college graduates fit that description. The more common definition of “underemployed” is “working in jobs that generally don’t require one to have a college degree.” By that definition, 46 percent of recent college graduates are underemployed. See also Catherine Dunn, “Are College Grads Destined For Jobs As Baristas And Clerks? Federal Reserve Economists Explain,” International Business Times, September 4, 2014. http://www.ibtimes.com/arecollege-grads-destined-jobs-baristas-clerks-federal-reserve-economists-explain-1679120 12 | SUSTAINABILITY NAS sides of this debate. The appeal of the sustainability movement depends to a great extent on the belief that the world is experiencing catastrophic warming as a result of human activities that are increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Is this belief warranted? We are neutral on this proposition, but we stand by the principle that all important ideas ought to be open to reasoned debate and careful examination of the evidence. This puts us and others at odds with many in the sustainability movement whose declared position is that the time for debate is over and that those who persist in raising basic questions are “climate deniers.” The “debate-isover” position is itself at odds with intellectual freedom and is why the campus sustainability movement should be examined skeptically. We support good stewardship of natural resources, but we see in the sustainability movement a hardening of irrational demands to suspend free inquiry in favor of unproven theories of imminent catastrophe. And we see, under the aegis of sustainability, a movement that often takes its bearings from its hostility towards material prosperity, consumerism, free markets, and even democratic self-government. We offer ten recommendations under three categories: Respect Intellectual Freedom 1. Create neutral ground. Colleges and universities should be neutral in important and unresolved scientific debates, such as the debate over dangerous anthropogenic global warming. Claims made on the authority of “science” must be made on the basis of transparent evidence and openness to good arguments regardless of their source. 2. Cut the apocalyptic rhetoric. Presenting students with a steady diet of doomsday scenarios undermines liberal education. 3. Maintain civility. Some student sustainability protests have aimed at preventing opponents from speaking. 4. Stop “nudging.” Leave students the space to make their own decisions about sustainability, and free faculty members from the implied pressure to embed sustainability into the curricula of unrelated courses. Uphold Institutional Integrity 5. Withdraw from the ACUPCC. Colleges that have signed the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment should withdraw in favor of open-minded debate on the subject. 6. Open the books and pull back the sustainability hires. Make the pursuit of sustainability by colleges financially transparent. The growth of administrative and staff positions in sustainability drives up costs HIGHER EDUCATION’S NEW FUNDAMENTALISM| 13 NAS and wrongly institutionalizes advocacy at the expense of education. 7. Uphold environmental stewardship. Campuses need to recover the distinction between real environmental stewardship and a movement that uses the term as a springboard for a much broader agenda. 8. Credential wisely. Curtail the aggrandizement of sustainability as a subject. Sustainability is not a discipline or even a subject area. It is an ideology. Be Even-Handed 9. Equalize treatment for advocates. Treat sustainability groups on campus under the same rubric as other advocacy groups. They should not enjoy privileged immunity from ordinary rules and special access to institutional resources. 10. Examine motives. College and university boards of trustees should examine demands for divestment from fossil fuels skeptically and with full awareness of the ideological context in which these demands are made. The sustainability movement has become a major force in American life that has largely escaped serious critical scrutiny. The goal of this report is to change that by examining for the first time the movement’s ideological, economic, and practical effects on institutions of higher education

https://web.archive.org/web/20120314143026/http://old.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=242

Media Transparency Profile

Total Grants to National Association of Scholars, Inc.	Total Grants to National Association of Scholars, Inc.
Total $ Granted:	$ 10,904,818
For Years:	2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996 1995 1994 1993 1992 1991 1990 1989 1988
Grants:	141

Grants to National Association of Scholars, Inc.

Click date for grant details.

Date	Amount	Purpose	Funder
1-1-2006	40,000	General operating support	Castle Rock Foundation
12-31-2005	250,000	General operating support	Sarah Scaife Foundation
12-31-2005	42,000	During calendar year 2005 to support the development of new college and university programs fostering the study of the free institutions of Western civilization.	Earhart Foundation
12-31-2005	50,000	General support	John M. Olin Foundation, Inc.
12-31-2005	2,500	Educational programs	Armstrong Foundation
12-31-2005	5,000	Free Institutions & American Founding	Philip M. McKenna Foundation, Inc.
9-9-2005	37,500	To support general operations	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
7-10-2005	37,500	To support general operations	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
1-1-2005	40,000	General operating support	Castle Rock Foundation
1-1-2005	10,000	In support of the NAS Online Forum	Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation
1-1-2005	35,000	General support	F.M. Kirby Foundation
12-31-2004	250,000	General operating support	Sarah Scaife Foundation
12-31-2004	276	The Association for the Study of Free Institutions & Free Societies	John Templeton Foundation
12-31-2004	2,500	Educational programs	Armstrong Foundation
9-10-2004	37,500	To support general operations	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
7-9-2004	37,500	To support general operations	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
1-9-2004	37,500	To support general operations	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
1-1-2004	30,000	General operating support	Castle Rock Foundation
1-1-2004	32,500	General support	F.M. Kirby Foundation
1-1-2004	5,000	Teaching of the American Founding & free institutions	Philip M. McKenna Foundation, Inc.
1-1-2004	10,000	In support of the NAS Online Forum	Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation
12-31-2003	250,000	General operating support	Sarah Scaife Foundation
12-31-2003	22,500	The Association for the Study of Free Institutions and Free Societies	John Templeton Foundation
8-11-2003	37,500	To support general operations	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
8-11-2003	30,000	To support a research project on anti-Americanism	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
4-25-2003	150,000	Programs and publications on American higher education	John M. Olin Foundation, Inc.
1-13-2003	37,500	To support general operations	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
1-1-2003	32,500	For general operating support other than lobbying activities	F.M. Kirby Foundation
1-1-2003	30,000	General operating support	Castle Rock Foundation
1-1-2003	5,000	Freedom Studies Project	Philip M. McKenna Foundation, Inc.
1-1-2003	5,000	NAS Online Forum	Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation
12-31-2002	4,000	Educational programs	Armstrong Foundation
9-10-2002	10,000	To support the Committee for Academic Freedom and Rights	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
8-9-2002	37,500	To support general operations	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
3-23-2002	100,000	No purpose given	Randolph Foundation
1-10-2002	75,000	To support general operations	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
1-1-2002	250,000	No comment provided	Sarah Scaife Foundation
1-1-2002	30,000	General operating support	Castle Rock Foundation
1-1-2002	150,000	programs and publications on American higher education	John M. Olin Foundation, Inc.
1-1-2002	5,000	No purpose given.	Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation
1-1-2002	50,000	No purpose given.	Jaquelin Hume Foundation
1-1-2002	5,000	General Operations	Philip M. McKenna Foundation, Inc.
1-1-2002	30,000	For general operating support other than lobbying activities	F.M. Kirby Foundation
12-31-2001	4,000	Educational programs	Armstrong Foundation
8-10-2001	75,000	To support general operations	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
1-1-2001	30,000	General operating support	Castle Rock Foundation
1-1-2001	250,000	No purpose given.	Sarah Scaife Foundation
1-1-2001	25,000	The administration of the John M. Olin Faculty Fellowship program	John M. Olin Foundation, Inc.
1-1-2001	150,000	Programs and publications on American higher education	John M. Olin Foundation, Inc.
1-1-2001	10,000	Academic Leadership Project	Philip M. McKenna Foundation, Inc.
1-1-2001	5,000	No purpose given.	Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation
1-1-2001	100,000	No purpose given.	Jaquelin Hume Foundation
1-1-2001	30,000	General support	F.M. Kirby Foundation
1-1-2001	12,500	Project support	Brady Education Foundation, Inc.
12-31-2000	4,000	Educational programs	Armstrong Foundation
12-28-2000	75,000	To support general operations	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
8-10-2000	75,000	To support general operations	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
1-6-2000	75,000	To support general operations	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
1-1-2000	135,000	Programs and publications on American higher education.	John M. Olin Foundation, Inc.
1-1-2000	30,000	General operating support.	Castle Rock Foundation
1-1-2000	250,000	No purpose given.	Sarah Scaife Foundation
1-1-2000	25,000	Academic Leadership Project	Philip M. McKenna Foundation, Inc.
1-1-2000	5,000	No purpose given.	Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation
1-1-2000	100,000	No purpose given.	Jaquelin Hume Foundation
1-1-2000	27,500	General support	F.M. Kirby Foundation
1-1-2000	15,000	Project support	Brady Education Foundation, Inc.
12-31-1999	5,000	Educational programs	Armstrong Foundation
12-31-1999	2,500	Grant in support of essay on opponents of education standards	Thomas B. Fordham Foundation
1-1-1999	150,000	Programs and publications on American higher education	John M. Olin Foundation, Inc.
1-1-1999	25,000	The administration of the John M. Olin Faculty Fellowship program	John M. Olin Foundation, Inc.
1-1-1999	300,000	No purpose given	Sarah Scaife Foundation
1-1-1999	75,000	To support general operations	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
1-1-1999	75,000	Continued support of general operations	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
1-1-1999	25,000	General support of 1999 activities; promotes academic excellence on college campuses through a network of faculty	Castle Rock Foundation
1-1-1999	30,000	Promotes academic excellence on college campuses through a network of faculty. General support of 2000 activities	Castle Rock Foundation
1-1-1999	25,000	Academic Leadership Project	Philip M. McKenna Foundation, Inc.
1-1-1999	5,000	No purpose given.	Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation
1-1-1999	100,000	No purpose given.	Jaquelin Hume Foundation
1-1-1999	27,500	General support	F.M. Kirby Foundation
1-1-1999	15,000	Project support	Brady Education Foundation, Inc.
8-10-1998	75,000	To support general operations	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
1-1-1998	150,000	Programs and publications on American higher education	John M. Olin Foundation, Inc.
1-1-1998	300,000	no description given	Sarah Scaife Foundation
1-1-1998	25,000	Academic Leadership Project	Philip M. McKenna Foundation, Inc.
1-1-1998	25,000	General support; promotes a return to academic excellence on college campuses through a network of faculty	Castle Rock Foundation
1-1-1998	21,364	No purpose given.	William H. Donner Foundation
1-1-1998	25,000	General support	F.M. Kirby Foundation
1-1-1998	15,000	Project support	Brady Education Foundation, Inc.
12-18-1997	75,000	To support general operations	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
8-22-1997	75,000	To support general operations	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
4-10-1997	50,000	To support the Faculty Harassment Defense Fund at the University of Wisconsin-Madison	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
2-28-1997	75,000	To support general operations	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
1-1-1997	150,000	Programs and publications on American higher education	John M. Olin Foundation, Inc.
1-1-1997	300,000	GENERAL OPERATING SUPPORT	Sarah Scaife Foundation
1-1-1997	25,000	Academic Leadership Project	Philip M. McKenna Foundation, Inc.
1-1-1997	15,000	(PA Chapter - Wyncote, PA) Curriculum Requirements Project	Philip M. McKenna Foundation, Inc.
1-1-1997	30,000	General operating needs	Castle Rock Foundation
1-1-1997	15,000	Project support	Brady Education Foundation, Inc.
11-20-1996	25,000	To support general operations	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
10-10-1996	50,000	To support the Faculty Harassment Defense Fund	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
8-16-1996	75,000	To support general operations	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
1-4-1996	75,000	Continued support of general operations	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
1-1-1996	150,000	Programs and publications on American higher education	John M. Olin Foundation, Inc.
1-1-1996	55,000	The completion of a book by Stephen H. Balch on higher education reform	John M. Olin Foundation, Inc.
1-1-1996	300,000	GENERAL OPERATING SUPPORT	Sarah Scaife Foundation
1-1-1996	25,000	General operating support of agency that promotes academic reform through research publications and collaboration among like-minded professors	Castle Rock Foundation
8-10-1995	75,000	To support general operations	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
1-20-1995	75,000	Continued support of general operations	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
1-1-1995	125,000	Programs and publications on American higher education	John M. Olin Foundation, Inc.
1-1-1995	300,000	GENERAL OPERATING SUPPORT	Sarah Scaife Foundation
1-1-1995	25,000	General support; agency defends democratic values on college campuses	Castle Rock Foundation
8-19-1994	75,000	Continued support of general operations	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
1-31-1994	75,000	To support general program activities	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
1-1-1994	125,000	Programs and publications on American higher education	John M. Olin Foundation, Inc.
1-1-1994	300,000	GENERAL OPERATING SUPPORT	Sarah Scaife Foundation
8-20-1993	72,500	Continued support of general program activities	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
1-4-1993	72,500	To support general program activities	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
1-1-1993	110,000	To support publications and conferences	John M. Olin Foundation, Inc.
1-1-1993	405,000	GENERAL OPERATING AND ACCREDITATION PROGRAM SUPPORT	Sarah Scaife Foundation
8-4-1992	72,500	To support general program activities	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
1-1-1992	125,000	To support publications and conferences	John M. Olin Foundation, Inc.
1-1-1992	300,000	GENERAL OPERATING AND ACCREDITATION PROGRAM SUPPORT	Sarah Scaife Foundation
12-18-1991	18,000	To support a book project by Carol Iannone.	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
11-15-1991	62,500	To support general programs.	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
8-15-1991	62,500	To support general programs.	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
8-15-1991	35,000	To support the Association's speakers program during the 1991-92 academic year.	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
3-5-1991	15,000	To support the Wisconsin Association of Scholars speakers program during the 1991-92 academic year.	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
2-5-1991	45,200	To support the association's operations and chapter expansion in the 1990-91 academic year.	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
1-1-1991	125,000	To support publications and conferences	John M. Olin Foundation, Inc.
1-1-1991	75,000	GRANT TO ESTABLISH A NEW ACCREDITATION ASSOCIATION	Sarah Scaife Foundation
1-1-1991	300,000	GENERAL OPERATING SUPPORT	Sarah Scaife Foundation
9-15-1990	45,200	To support the association's operations and chapter expansion in the 1990-91 academic year.	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
1-1-1990	125,000	To support publications and conferences	John M. Olin Foundation, Inc.
1-1-1990	26,000	CURRICULUM REFORM CONFERENCE	Sarah Scaife Foundation
1-1-1990	225,000	GENERAL OPERATING SUPPORT	Sarah Scaife Foundation
8-1-1989	86,778	To support program activities during 1989-90.	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
1-1-1989	125,000	To support the Fellows Program and other activities	John M. Olin Foundation, Inc.
1-1-1989	75,000	General operating support	Sarah Scaife Foundation
7-14-1988	83,000	General support and expansion of the Association's chapters in the Midwest.	The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.
1-1-1988	85,000	To support the Fellows Program	John M. Olin Foundation, Inc.
1-1-1988	50,000	General operating support	Sarah Scaife Foundation

peter wood natass

Publications (8)

Updated: With complete list of Mashey Papers

Isn’t it Time to Slam the Gate?

New Mashey Report Drills into Academic Misconduct

Tyranny or Theft? Part 1

Tyranny or Theft? Part 2

Tyranny or Theft? Part 3

Background and experience

Climate science and policy

Expertise is unclear

Writings are dismissive

Articles and resources

References

Related SourceWatch articles

External resources

Bottling Up Global Warming Skepticism

New Mashey Report Disrobes Climate Disinformer

Grants:

Grants to National Association of Scholars, Inc.