Penn State univ
this is i think generic for all penn colleges
see wharton
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note hypocrisy on cancel culture BS horrible irony is that silence israel protest BOOSTS genocide in gaza
12 23 an
america’s prestigious universities play a big role in determining who gets into America’s wealthy elite.
A degree from Harvard, Penn, or M.I.T., to take three examples, is a meal ticket to a lucrative job on Wall Street or a corporate law firm and to the richest and most influential people in the land.
But as America becomes increasingly stratified by wealth, those tickets are easily abused.
Universities that give preference in admissions to the children or grandchildren of major donors serve to widen inequality even further.
Universities that allow major donors to influence what is taught or expressed on campus could be seen to suppress ideas that threaten the wealthy — which could chill freedom of expression and fuel social resentment.
Which brings us to the latest imbroglio.
Last Tuesday, the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, and M.I.T. tried to give precise answers to questions from members of Congress about whether their university cultures had encouraged hostility towards Jews — hostility that has surged since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s attack on Gaza in response.
In their opening remarks, all three denied it, and repeatedly condemned antisemitism.
Then Elise Stefanik, a Republican representative from New York (and herself a Harvard graduate) asked a yes or no question: would calls for genocide of Jews on campus violate their codes of conduct or harassment policies?
The presidents hedged. “If the speech turns into conduct, yes, it can be harassment,” Penn’s president, M. Elizabeth Magill, a former dean of Stanford Law School, replied in lawyer-like fashion.
“I’m asking if specifically calling for the genocide of Jews — does that constitute bullying or harassment?” Stefanik pressed her point.
“If it is directed and severe or pervasive, it is harassment,” said Magill.
“So the answer is yes?”
“It is a context-dependent decision, congresswoman,” Magill said.
Faced with the same question, Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, also temporized. “It can be,” she said, “depending on the context.”
The university presidents should have answered unambiguously and unequivocally that calls for genocide of any group are intolerable.
Their failure to do so has fueled a firestorm.
Ross Stevens, a hedge fund manager, said he would withdraw a $100 million gift to Penn. Other wealthy Penn donors called for Magill to resign.
Even prior to the hearing, a campaign had been launched by some of Wall Street’s most powerful figures to oust all three university presidents for failing to adequately condemn Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.
The influential board of advisers of Penn’s Wharton School’s, chaired by Marc Rowan of Apollo Global Management, one of the world’s largest private equity firms, called on alumni to withhold donations to Penn.
The billionaire investor Bill Ackman, Harvard alumnus and head of New York hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management, called for the three university presidents to be fired.
The day after their testimony, Magill and Gay issued statements in efforts to contain the damage.
But on Saturday evening, after an emergency meeting of Penn’s board of trustees, Magill resigned under pressure.
Over the weekend, calls from donors for Harvard’s Claudine Gay to resign grew louder, as prominent donors demanded her ouster, too.
I can well understand the anger and frustration of these donors. In their congressional testimony, the university presidents should have been clearer that their institutions do not tolerate calls for genocide. Period.
But to use their power as major donors to force or seek the ouster of these presidents is almost as repugnant as the failures of these presidents to unambiguously condemn calls for genocide. It endangers the autonomy of America’s universities.
Who’s kidding whom? Those of us who have spent our lifetimes teaching in prestigious universities are well aware of the influence of big donors. The major job of today’s university presidents is to solicit money, and their largest targets are typically denizens of Wall Street.
For the same reason, boards of trustees are packed with wealthy alumni, often from the Street, who routinely veto candidates for university presidentships harboring views they find offensive.
But not until now have major donors so brazenly used their financial influence to hound presidents out of office for failing to come out as clearly as the donors would like on an issue of campus speech or expression.
As a Jew, I cannot help but worry, too, that the actions of these donors will fuel the very antisemitism they claim to oppose — based on the perilous stereotype of wealthy Jewish bankers controlling the world.
*Robert Reich is a professor at Berkeley and was secretary of labor under Bill Clinton. You can find his writing at https://robertreich.substack.com/.*
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guk 11 23
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Students at six universities filed legal complaints on Monday accusing their colleges of breaking a little-known law by investing in planet-heating fossil fuels, the Guardian has learned.
Campus organizers from the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago, Tufts University, Pomona College, Washington University in St Louis and Pennsylvania State University wrote to the attorneys general of their respective states to ask officials to scrutinize their universities’ investments. Each filing elicited signatures of support from dozens of faculty and staff members, alumni and local, national and international climate-focused groups.
The students argue that by investing in coal, oil and gas, the schools are violating their obligations as non-profit organizations to prioritize the public interest.
“Fossil fuel companies have long engaged in a well-documented campaign to undermine climate science and distort public debate about how to deal with the climate crisis – including through efforts targeting Penn scientists and researchers,” University of Pennsylvania students wrote in their filing. “The industry’s spread of scientific misinformation undermines the work of Penn faculty and students who are researching and designing solutions for a sustainable future.”
The filings estimate that each of the schools has tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars invested in fossil fuels.
https://www.democracynow.org/2022/10/26/penn_state_cancels_gavin_mcinnes_speech
students maced
https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/heritage-foundation/
...
Influence
In January 2020, for the third consecutive year, Heritage was ranked as the top think tank in the “Significant Impact on Public Policy” category of the 2019 Global Go To Think Tank Index Report from the University of Pennsylvania’s Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program. In its annual ranking, the Penn report considers more than 8,200 think tanks in the world and surveys the opinion of nearly 4,000 journalists, donors, and policy experts. [39]
Heritage’s policy range covers dozens of subject areas, and most every major issue that affects federal and state elected officials. In 2019 Heritage policy experts testified 33 times before Congressional committees, and produced more than 200 advisory documents, including 12 special policy reports. [40]
Heritage has had major influence over both policy making and policy successes during several Republican presidential administrations, in particular those of Reagan and Trump. [41] It also has been critical of Republican presidents when they have rejected Heritage’s policy goals[42] and accomplished major policy objectives during a Democratic presidential administration. [43] [44]
REAGAN ADMINISTRATION
During the 1980 presidential election, Heritage produced Mandate for Leadership, a 20 volume, 3,000-page guide of policy advice for whomever won the presidency. After winning the election, President Ronald Reagan delivered a 1,100-page abridged edition of the document to attendees of his first cabinet meeting. A follow-up set of recommendations was published for Reagan’s second term in office. [45] [46]
According *The Atlantic*, the Reagan Administration implemented at least 60 percent of the proposals. The late right-leaning essayist and National Review founder William F. Buckley, Jr., quipped that Heritage’s influence was the reason “Mr. Reagan’s tenure was 60 percent successful.” Analyzing 22 policy ideas put forward by Reagan in his second inaugural address in 1985, a *New York Times* report noted that “the wording of the president’s speech and the foundation’s document were different” but “many of the proposals were strikingly similar.” [47] [48]
Examples of Heritage ideas the Reagan administration turned into federal policy included a 23 percent reduction in federal taxes across all income groups, the creation of “enterprise zones” (tax and regulatory relief offered to entrepreneurs willing to invest in blighted urban areas), and the Strategic Defense Initiative (research on a defensive shield to protect the nation from a nuclear missile attack). [49] [50]
GEORGE H.W. BUSH ADMINISTRATION
....
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
CENTER FOR BIOETHICS
According to its website, the Center for Bioethics is involved in bioethics research and its deployment in the ethical, efficient, and compassionate practice of the life sciences and medicine.
It receives funding support from AstraZeneca, Cephalon, Chiron Corporation, Du Pont, Fujisawa Healthcare, Genomics Collaborative, GlaxoSmithKline, Independence Blue Cross, Johnson & Johnson, Merck & Co., Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation, Schering-Plough Corporation. Corporate funding makes up 4% of the total budget for the center. (http://www.med.upenn.edu/bioethic/funds/; accessed 2/24/03)
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http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Frank_Clemente
Frank Clemente is a professor of sociology at Penn State University. He formerly served as the head of the sociology department, and director of the university's Environmental Policy Center. His areas of research include energy policy around the "development of such energy resources as natural gas, oil and coal" and the "socio-economic aspects of construction of power plants, dams, pipelines and transmission lines." [1] He is a speaker at the International Conference on Climate Change (2009) put on by the Heartland Institute think tank.
Contents
Publications
Clemente co-authored an article for the National Coal Council titled "The Urgency of Sustainable Coal," and has published numerous articles for energy industry-related media including Public Utilities Fortnightly, Electrical World, Nuclear News, World Oil, American Coal, Oil and Gas Journal, and the Journal of Commerce. [2]
In early 2011 Clemente made a submission to an Australian government agency proposing approaches to cutting greenhouse emissions from power stations. Clemente's submission was made on behalf of the coal company, Peabody Energy.[3]
Clemente was a speaker at the International Conference on Climate Change (2009), organized by the Heartland Institute think tank. [4]
Articles and resources
Related SourceWatch articles
- Global warming skeptics
- Heartland Institute
- International Conference on Climate Change (2009)
- SourceWatch:Project:Creating Articles on Sponsors and Speakers at The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change
References
- :{Jump up:(style="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;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:↑ "Frank Clemente," Department of Sociology, Penn State University website, accessed March 2009.
- :{Jump up:(style="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;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:↑ "Expert Profile", Coal Can Do That website, accessed February 2009.
- :{Jump up:(style="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;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:↑ Frank Clemente, "Australia's Coal in Context", January 7, 2011.
- :{Jump up:(style="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;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:↑ "Speakers," Heartland Institute website, accessed January 2009.
External resources
External articles
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Greenpeace Subterfuge Tests Climate
Research
By JOHN SCHWARTZ DEC. 9, 2015
A sting operation by the environmental group Greenpeace suggests that some
researchers who dispute mainstream scientific conclusions on climate change
are willing to conceal the sources of payment for their research, even if the
money is purported to come from overseas corporations producing oil, gas and
coal.
Over a period of several months, two Greenpeace employees posed as
representatives of energy companies and offered to pay prominent
commentators on climate change to write papers that extolled the benefits of
coal and carbon emissions. The Greenpeace workers also asked that the
payments not be disclosed.
The commentators — a professor from Princeton University and one from
Pennsylvania State University — agreed to the offers.
Disclosure of funding for scientific research has been a flash point in the
fight over climate change, especially in the case of published scientific
research. The effort by Greenpeace, which has a long record of using
aggressive tactics to make environmental statements, was to “unravel the
story” of industry ties to denial of climate change, said Lawrence Carter, one of
the Greenpeace employees involved in the subterfuge.
12/9/2015 Greenpeace Subterfuge Tests Climate Research The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/09/science/greenpeacesubterfugetestsclimateresearch.html?_r=0 2/4
“It shows a way that fossil fuel money can get into funding these climate
skeptic campaign groups,” he added.
Frank Clemente, a professor emeritus of sociology at Penn State, agreed to
write a paper on coal on behalf of a coal mining firm that he was told was
based in Indonesia. William Happer, a professor of physics at Princeton,
agreed to write a paper at the request of an unnamed oil and gas company in
the Middle East.
Both men acknowledged, in response to requests for comments, that the
exchanged emails about the arrangements, which Greenpeace released on
Tuesday, were genuine. But both denied having done anything improper.
Dr. Clemente formerly served as director of an environmental policy
center at Penn State. He said in an email response to questions: “I fully stand
behind every single statement I made in the emails apparently pirated by
Greenpeace. I am very proud of my research and believe that clean coal
technologies are the pathway to reliable and affordable electricity, reduction of
global energy poverty and a cleaner environment.”
In an email message responding to a request for comment, Dr. Happer
said, “I don’t think I have anything to be embarrassed about.”
When asked whether he agreed that there should be full disclosure of
foreign and industry influence on science, Dr. Happer said, “Yes, I believe in
full disclosure.”
But, he added, “I don’t think that full disclosure was the point of the
Greenpeace article at all. The aim was simply to smear their enemies.”
Dr. Happer testified on Tuesday at a hearing of the Senate subcommittee
on Space, Science and Competitiveness, whose chairman is Senator Ted Cruz,
Republican of Texas and a presidential candidate who disagrees with the
scientific consensus on climate change.
12/9/2015 Greenpeace Subterfuge Tests Climate Research The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/09/science/greenpeacesubterfugetestsclimateresearch.html?_r=0 3/4
Michael Halpern, a program manager at the Union of Concerned
Scientists, expressed discomfort over the scrutiny of unguarded email
exchanges, a controversial element of months-long efforts by Representative
Lamar Smith, Republican of Texas, to challenge the work of climate scientists
from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“I know they can be taken out of context,” Mr. Halpern said. But, he
added, “It’s entirely justified to ask for information that relates to researchers’
funding and whether there are any strings attached.”
Dr. Happer wrote in his exchanges with Greenpeace that he believed there
were “real pollutants associated with the combustion of fossil fuels,” including
the oxides of nitrogen and sulfur that contribute to smog, and that he
supported regulation of those pollutants.
But he opposed the notion that carbon dioxide itself is a pollutant.
“More CO2 will benefit the world,” he wrote. “The only way to limit CO2
would be to stop using fossil fuels, which I think would be a profoundly
immoral and irrational policy.”
Dr. Happer suggested to the purported funders that he not be paid
directly. “My activities to push back against climate extremism are a labor of
love,” he wrote.
He recommended that money for the project be paid to a nonprofit
organization he helped found this year, the CO2 Coalition, which he said paid
him no fees or salary, but “covers occasional travel expenses.”
On the question of disclosure, Dr. Happer said, “I don’t think there would
be any problem stating that ‘the author received no financial compensation for
this essay.’ ”
Dr. Happer then wrote to William O’Keefe, managing director of the
nonprofit, and said, “I am trying to get another mysterious client to donate
12/9/2015 Greenpeace Subterfuge Tests Climate Research The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/09/science/greenpeacesubterfugetestsclimateresearch.html?_r=0 4/4
funds to the CO2 Coalition instead of compensating me for my writing
something for them.” Dr. Happer also asked Mr. O’Keefe about disclosure.
Mr. O’Keefe responded, “We are under no obligation to identify donors,
except to the I.R.S.,” and that list, he said, is redacted before release to the
public
While the eyes of the world are on Paris, where nations are hammering out an agreement to do something about the reality of climate change, the Senate Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness once again held a hearing on Tuesday to debate whether climate change is for real. Subcommittee Chairman Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who is running for his party’s presidential nomination, convened the hearing titled “Data or dogma? Promoting open inquiry in the debate over the magnitude of human impact on Earth’s climate.”
Senator Cruz opened the hearing with some ironic remarks. “This is a hearing on the science behind the claims of global warming. Now, this is the Science Subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee, and we’re hearing from distinguished scientists, sharing their views, their interpretations, their analysis of the data and the evidence. Now, I am the son of two mathematicians—two computer programmers and scientists—and I believe that public policy should follow the actual science, and the actual data and evidence, and not political and partisan claims that run contrary to the science and data and evidence.”Senator Cruz brought in four witnesses to testify, mostly chosen from the usual suspects that have participated in similar hearings in the past. There were two of the very small handful of climate scientists who express doubts about human responsibility for climate change—Georgia Tech professor and blogger Judith Curry and John Christyfrom the University of Alabama in Huntsville. William Happer, a retired Princeton physicist and chairman of theGeorge C. Marshall Institute, a conservative think-tank, was also invited to speak. The fourth person brought in to talk climate science was conservative radio host and columnistMark Steyn. (The last two were keynote speakers at this year’s Heartland Institute conference for climate “skeptics.”)
John Christy, who has helped develop the UAH satellite temperature dataset favored by climate “skeptics” because it shows slower warming in portions of the troposphere than we see in surface records, made his pitch for why we just don’t know what has caused recent warming. That explanation involved highlighting his graph of tropical mid-troposphere (rather than global surface) model projections and observations that frequently appears in the comments on stories like this one—a graph other climate scientists take issue with—and claiming that emissions cuts would have a minimal impact on climate change. While claiming that research funding is biased, he proposed setting aside five to 10 percent of federal climate research funding for a “Red Team” like the CIA section tasked with outside-the-box analyses that challenge the status quo. This Red Team would “produce an assessment that expresses legitimate, alternative hypotheses” for climate change.
Judith Curry echoed Christy’s complaints, claiming that climate science has fallen victim to “groupthink”—a conclusion she says she reached after reading the quote-mined “Climategate” e-mails between scientists in 2009. (A pile of subsequent independent investigations found no evidence of scientific misconduct.) The rest of Curry’s testimony entailed claims that the science of anthropogenic climate change is unsettled, which she has spoken and written about at length over the years.
Mark Steyn’s testimony focused on his accusations that climate science is fraudulent and oppresses contrarians. Steyn’s claim to climate fame is that he’s being sued for defamation by Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann, whom Steyn has repeatedly accused of fraud.
William Happerused most of his time to argue that rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are good for the planet, claiming that there is “not much dispute” that there is too little CO2 and too much oxygen for plants right now. He also seemed to like Christy’s “Red Team” idea, as he said climate science lacks an “adversarial process” to check if the science is right. (Of course, “an adversarial process” isn’t a bad description of peer review or the work of thousands of independent researchers.) “I would like to argue very strongly that we set aside some fraction of funding for climate research that is designed to be for the other side,” Happer said. That would run counter to the way funding is granted today, which is based on the hypothesis and the quality of the test rather than what the resulting conclusion is going to be.
Happer became a story in his own right earlier in the day, when Greenpeace released e-mails with Happer in which they had pretended to represent a foreign energy company. They asked Happer if he would produce a report extolling the virtues of CO2 but without disclosing their financial support, and Happer agreed this was something he could do. Happer explained that Peabody Coal Company had paid him $8,000 to testify at regulatory hearings in Minnesota. That fee went to the tax-exemptCO:{2:(style="vertical-align:bottom;position:relative;top:0.35em"):}: Coalition, which he said pays his travel expenses but no salary. Just before Tuesday’s hearing, someone from Greenpeace filmed a heated exchange with Happer asking whether he had been paid to testify. Happer seemed to indicate that the CO2 Coalition “took some of my fee” before rising out of his chair and angrily replying, “I haven’t taken a dime, you son of a bitch.”
Finally, there was testimony from a witness invited by committee Democrats—former Navy Rear Admiral and current Penn State meteorology professor David Titley. Titley calmly attempted to explain the basics of climate science, highlighting the fact that nothing is ever 100 percent certain in science, yet we understand how to act on risks despite imperfect knowledge.
A question-and-answer portion followed this testimony, which at one point devolved to Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Steyn, and Curry pretty much shouting at each other. But there was also some discussion about satellite temperature data sets. (Curiously, this involved no questions for John Christy, who helps run one.) Senator Cruz is fond of claiming that one of the satellite data sets shows “no warming for 18 years” while ignoring longer-term trends and the fact that all surface temperature data sets show warming over that period.
After Senator Cruz pushed Titley to answer a question about the satellite records, which he claimed “the global warming alarmists don’t want to talk about,” Titley let loose. “Let’s talk about the satellite measurements,” Titley said. “Let’s talk about orbital decay. Let’s talk about overlapping satellite records. Let’s talk about stratospheric temperature contamination. I think Dr. Christy and Dr. [Roy] Spencer, when they’ve put this out, they have been wrong, I think, at least four consecutive times. Each time the data record has had to be adjusted upward. There have been several sign errors. So, with all due respect, sir, I don’t know which data, exactly, your staff has, whether it’s the first or second or third or fourth correction to Dr. Christy’s data. We used to have a negative trend, and then we had no trend, and now we begrudgingly have an upward trend.”
To be fair, Senator Cruz was pointing to a competing data set run by Remote Sensing Systems in California that, until recently, showed an even smaller 18-year warming trend than the University of Alabama in Huntsville data set. And the latest version of that UAH data set, which is in beta, reduces that trend once again.
In a curious moment, William Happer chimed in to state that these satellites measure temperatures “the same way as hospitals do today,” with devices that measure infrared radiation. In fact, these satellites measure microwaveradiation, and doctors aren’t trying to simultaneously determine temperatures of various layers inside you when they pop a thermometer in your ear.
Senator Cruz also accused scientists of deliberately manipulating land surface temperature data to create the appearance of warming over the 20th Century. (Quality-control adjustments to sea surface temperature data, which obviously involve a much larger portion of the globe, actually make the overall effect a decrease in global 20th Century warming.) When asked about this, Judith Curry didn’t quite support Senator Cruz’s accusation but did comment, “To me, the error bars should really be much bigger if they’re making such a large adjustment, so we really don’t know too much about what’s going on.”
In contrast to this talk of uncertainty and scientific skullduggery, Senator Gary Peters (D-Mich.) opted for some remedial physics in his opening comments. “By burning fossil fuels, humans are releasing carbon into the atmosphere that would have otherwise remained locked away. This process creates carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that traps heat that otherwise would have been radiated off into space. We know that by the law of conservation of energy, that additional heat can’t just magically disappear. Instead, it causes our planet to get warmer.”
http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/12/senate-science-committee-hearing-challenges-dogma-of-climate-science/
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