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The 27-page settlement proposal of demands sent by President Donald Trump to UCLA in exchange or $1.2 billion in funding, made public Friday, is being called a "gross federal overreach," according to anew report in Cal Matters.
The document was made public after public after the UCLA Faculty Association and the Council of University of California Faculty Associations sued the public university to disclose the information under the California Public Records Act.
The proposal outlines the administration’s vision for higher education that is free from efforts to promote diversity and transgender inclusion, according to Cal Matters.
While the university system argued that making the proposal public would cause it “irreparable harm” during ongoing negotiations with the Trump administration, it was released after a California superior court judge ordered it to do so, and the state Supreme Court rejected its appeal.
The list of demands was the result of the U.S. Department of Justice in July accusing the university of not doing enough to combat antisemitism during last year’s pro-Palestine protests, and for allegedly violating federal civil rights law.
Governor Gavin Newsom has characterized the fine as “extortion,” and UC President James Milliken said that paying the settlement would “completely devastate” the university system.
So far, Brown University, Dartmouth College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of Arizona, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California (USC) and University of Virginia (UVA) have rejected Trump's compact due to concerns over academic freedom and institutional independence.
"In issuing the demands, the Trump administration initially withheld more than $500 million in research grants to UCLA. But its leverage remains unclear now after a federal judge ordered the administration to restore nearly all those grants in August and September," Cal Matters reports.
Among Trump's demands of UCLA:
*Hire a senior administrator to review UCLA’s policies related to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, and eliminate “identity-based preferences” in faculty hiring and scholarship programs.
Prohibit the use of “personal statements, diversity narratives, or any applicant reference to racial identity as a means to introduce or justify discrimination” in its admissions process. (A 2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling already prohibits race-based admissions, though students are free to submit essays that detail how race affected their lives.)
Prohibit the UCLA School of Medicine and its affiliated hospitals from performing gender affirming surgeries or hormone therapy for patients under 18.
Issue a public statement saying that it will comply with Trump’s executive order that recognizes male and female as the only two sexes.
Ban female transgender student athletes from participating in women’s sports.
Establish a process so that “foreign students likely to engage in anti-Western, anti-American, or antisemitic disruptions or harassment” are not admitted to UCLA. (That seems to be at odds with the letter’s goal of protecting UCLA “faculty and students from retaliation for expressing minority opinions or engaging in free expression.”)
Develop training materials to “socialize international students to the norms of a campus dedicated to free inquiry and open debate.”*
Cal Matters notes that some of these, including the elimination of diversity statements in faculty hiring and banning overnight demonstrations, are already UC policy.
In regards to the Trump administration's use of "antisemitism" as an impetus for these demands, over 600 Jewish students, faculty and alumni publicly opposed the settlement in an open letter published in August titled, "Jews in defense of UC."
The UCLA Faculty Association agrees.
“It is not just today’s students and workers who will be harmed by this gross federal overreach — but generations of Californians," said association president Anna Markowitz.
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We speak with esteemed historian scholar Ellen Schrecker about the Trump administration’s assault on universities and the crackdown on dissent, a climate of fear and censorship she describes as “worse than McCarthyism.”
“During the McCarthy period, it was attacking only individual professors and only about their sort of extracurricular political activities on the left. … Today, the repression that’s coming out of Washington, D.C., it attacks everything that happens on American campuses,” says Schrecker. “The damage that the Trump administration is doing is absolutely beyond the pale and has never, never been equaled in American life with regard to higher education.”
Schrecker is the author of many books about the McCarthy era, Cold War politics and right-wing attacks on academic freedom. Her recent piece for The Nation is headlined “Worse Than McCarthyism: Universities in the Age of Trump.”democracynow.org
AMY GOODMAN: President Trump’s crackdown on academic institutions in the United States was the focus of protests and commencement speeches this week as universities like Harvard held commencement ceremonies.
The Trump administration has now directed federal agencies to review all remaining contracts with Harvard, after it already canceled nearly $3 billion in federal research grants for the university and moved last week to revoke its ability to enroll international students. Harvard has two separate suits pending against Trump, arguing the moves violate due process, as well as free speech protections under the First Amendment because they target the university’s staff, curriculum and enrollment.
In his address at Harvard’s commencement ceremony Thursday, Stanford University professor, doctor and novelist Abraham Verghese praised the school’s defiance of Trump and spoke to students facing threats of deportation or having their visas revoked.
DR. ABRAHAM VERGHESE: When legal immigrants and others who are lawfully in this country, including so many of your international students, worry about being wrongly detained and even deported, perhaps it’s fitting that you hear from an immigrant like me. Perhaps it’s fitting that you hear from someone who was born in Ethiopia when it was ruled by an emperor, someone who then lived under the harsh military leader who overthrew the emperor, someone who had at least — who had at least one his medical school classmates tortured and disappear. … More than a quarter of the physicians in this country are foreign medical graduates. … So, a part of what makes America great, if I may use that phrase, is that it allows an immigrant like me to blossom here, just as generations of other immigrants and their children have flourished and contributed in every walk of life, working to keep America great.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s the novelist and medical doctor, Ethiopian Indian American, Dr. Abraham Verghese addressing Harvard’s commencement ceremony on Thursday. His latest book, The Covenant of Water.
Meanwhile, down the road in Cambridge, the Indian American class president at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spoke about how MIT’s undergraduate body and Graduate Student Union had voted overwhelmingly to cut ties with Israel. Megha Vemuri wore a red-and-white keffiyeh and said MIT students would never support a genocide, and praised them for continuing to protest despite, quote, “threats, intimidation and suppression coming from all directions, especially,” she said, “your own university officials.”
MEGHA VEMURI: Last spring, MIT’s undergraduate body and Graduate Student Union voted overwhelmingly to cut ties with the genocidal Israeli military. You called for a permanent cease fire in Gaza, and you stood in solidarity with the pro-Palestine activists on campus. You faced threats, intimidation and suppression coming from all directions, especially your own university officials. But you prevailed, because the MIT community that I know would never tolerate a genocide.
Right now while we prepare to graduate and move forward with our lives, there are no universities left in Gaza. We are watching Israel try to wipe Palestine off the face of the Earth, and it is a shame that MIT is a part of it. The Israeli occupation forces are the only foreign military that MIT has research ties with. This means that Israel’s assault on the Palestinian people is not only aided and abetted by our country, but our school. As scientists, engineers, academics and leaders, we have a commitment to support life, support aid efforts and call for an arms embargo and keep demanding now, as alumni, that MIT cuts the ties.
AMY GOODMAN: That was MIT class president Megha Vemuri, now Indian American graduate of MIT.
This comes as Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism — another school facing attacks by the Trump administration — writes for The New Yorker magazine this week about how, quote, “Academic freedom in the United States has found itself periodically under siege.” In his piece headlined “A Tumultuous Spring Semester Finally Comes to a Close,” he describes how he consulted with Ellen Schrecker, a historian and the author of No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, along with other deans at Columbia. They spoke about government repression on college campuses in the 1950s through to the present. Schrecker told him, quote, “I’ve studied McCarthyism’s impact on higher education for 50 years. What’s happening now is worse,” he quoted her saying.
Well, we begin today with Ellen Schrecker in person, joining us in our New York studio. She’s the author of Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities. Schrecker is also the author of The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom. And she just wrote a piece for The Nation headlined “Worse Than McCarthyism: Universities in the Age of Trump.” Schrecker has been active in the American Association of University Professors, AAUP, since the 1990s. I should note she has three degrees from Radcliffe Harvard and formerly taught there. She’s a graduate of Radcliffe 1960.
Ellen Schrecker, welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. As we look at these universities under attack, you’ve studied higher education for over half a century. Let’s talk about what was happening then and what’s happening today.
ELLEN SCHRECKER: OK. The main thing that happened then to universities was that about a hundred faculty members, most of them with tenure, were fired and blacklisted. That happened in every major institution of civil society within the United States. And although the universities pride themselves on academic freedom — whatever that means — they collaborated with the forces of repression through — that were actively imposing a climate of fear and self-censorship throughout American society.
Today, what’s happening is worse, so much worse that we have to really find a new phrase for it. I don’t know what it’ll be. But during the McCarthy period, it was attacking only individual professors and only about their sort of extracurricular political activities on the left, in the past and in the present, then present. Today, the repression that’s coming out of Washington, D.C., it attacks everything that happens on American campuses.
AMY GOODMAN: I’d like you to start off — we have a very young audience. We also have their parents and their grandparents around the world. And I’d like you to start off by talking about who McCarthy is. What do we mean by the McCarthyism of, for example, the 1950s?
ELLEN SCHRECKER: OK, that’s a very good way to start, because McCarthyism, unfortunately, is misnamed. It is not just the career of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who came in onto the stage of history in 1950 after the “ism” that he gave his name to had been really dominating American domestic politics since the late 1940s. ’47 is when the Truman administration imposed a loyalty test, an anti-communist loyalty test, on its employees.
So, if we wanted to name this phenomenon of political repression, anti-communist political repression — and I want to specify that it didn’t attack randomly people on the left, but very specifically people who had some kind of connection, usually in the past, with the communist movement, that during the 1930s and ’40s was the most dynamic force on the left, even though it was a very flawed, very flawed political group. It was nonetheless very influential on the left. And if we wanted to give that political repression of the 1940s and ’50s a name, it should have been Hooverism, after the FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, the movie Good Night and Good Luck, they showed real black-and-white footage of McCarthy, and test audiences thought he was too harsh, unrealistic, not realizing it was actual footage. And now you have Good Night and Good Luck on Broadway, George Clooney starring in it, and it is the financially most successful Broadway show we’ve seen, is going to be now for free on CNN in a few days. But the significance of that, that that — what people feel today was a cartoon character was, in fact, much harsher and sharper than people ever dreamed?
ELLEN SCHRECKER: Yeah, he was beyond the pale, because, like the current president, he had no guardrails, as it were.
AMY GOODMAN: Not to mention Roy Cohn, his sidekick in the hearings, who would later go on to mentor Donald Trump, until, at the very end of his life, Donald Trump rejected him when he was dying of AIDS.
ELLEN SCHRECKER: Exactly. So, there are lots of similarities with the fact that there’s this very aberrant character at the heart, or at the sort of public heart, of this repressive movement. But what we should have known in the '40s and ’50s, and should know now, is it's not just a one-man show. It has been this moment of trying to crack down on dissent, constitutional dissent, free speech, the ability to say what Israel is doing in Gaza is a terrible thing. That is something that has been building up for decades. And that was the same thing during McCarthyism. There was a kind of network of right-wing activists, similar to groups today, like the Heritage Society, that brought us the 2025 Project blueprint for Trump’s attack on the institutions of civil liberties and civil society, that has come to fruition since he entered the White House.
AMY GOODMAN: So, I mean, you speak as a Jewish author, active member of the American Association of University Professors. Would you say that the McCarthyism of yesteryear is the charges that President Trump, with his sidekick Elon Musk giving the “Heil Hitler” salute, charging antisemitism for what he’s doing?
ELLEN SCHRECKER: Antisemitism is a pretext. We know that. Trump has been all his life a racist, clearly befriending these fascist individuals and groups for years. And what we’re seeing is a kind of a melding of Trump’s own right-wing proclivities, reactionary proclivities, pro-fascist proclivities, with a long-term attempt within some pro-Zionist organizations to eliminate all support for Palestinian freedom and Palestinian liberation from American universities, in particular, but from within American society.
AMY GOODMAN: You have, earlier this month, a federal judge, Geoffrey Crawford, ordering the release of Columbia University graduate, Palestinian activist Mohsen Mahdawi from a prison in Vermont. He was picked up by masked, hooded ICE agents at his naturalization interview in Vermont. He was beyond holding a green card. The judge writing in his ruling, quote, “Our nation has seen times like this before, especially during the Red Scare and Palmer Raids of 1919-1920” and during the McCarthy period of the 1950s. And I wanted to take it beyond that. You note that, you know, that we’re not just talking about individual professors anymore. We’re talking about current attacks being much broader. And you write that — this interesting paradox, quote, “despite higher education’s much larger footprint within American society, today the academy is in a much weaker position to resist political intervention.” Why is it weaker?
ELLEN SCHRECKER: It’s weaker for two reasons. One, because the state is stronger. The state does much more with regard to higher education than it did in the 1950s. You know, it supports most important basic scientific research. It regulates things on campus with regard to, shall we say, diversity, equity and inclusion, with trying to ensure that all Americans have a good shot at higher education. That was a push by the federal government. So, you can see that the government is much more involved. It funds student loans. Most smaller universities without huge endowments rely on students who have to get federal loans in order to pay tuitions. So, what he’s doing by withdrawing federal money from higher education is, essentially, threatening to destroy American higher education today.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to the clip of Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaking in March following the arrest of the Columbia graduate student, now graduated graduate student, albeit he was in jail in Louisiana when he got his diploma at Columbia, Mahmoud Khalil.
SECRETARY OF STATE MARCO RUBIO: If you tell us, when you apply, “Hi. I’m trying to get into the United States on a student visa. I am a big supporter of Hamas, a murderous, barbaric group that kidnaps children, that rapes teenage girls, that takes hostages, that allows them to die in captivity, that returns more bodies than live hostages,” if you tell us that you are in favor of a group like this, and if you tell us when you apply for your visa, “And by the way, I intend to come to your country as a student and rile up all kinds of anti-Jewish student, antisemitic activities. I intend to shut down your universities,” if you told us all these things when you applied for a visa, we would deny your visa. I hope we would. If you actually end up doing that, once you’re in this country on such a visa, we will revoke it. And if you end up having a green card — not citizenship, but a green card — as a result of that visa while you’re here and those activities, we’re going to kick you out.
AMY GOODMAN: Of course, the Trump administration not proven any of this. And a number of students have been released from prison, with very angry judges talking about “Where are the grounds for these people to be imprisoned?” Mahmoud Khalil has been now imprisoned for three months as his little baby was born here in New York. If you can talk about what this leads to, these kind of harsh attacks, when it comes to speech and when it comes to universities? You were just addressing the deans at Columbia University. Some compare Harvard not fighting — Harvard fighting back against the Trump administration, and Columbia conceding, and the pressure it’s put on its students.
ELLEN SCHRECKER: Yeah, this has been a constant in the history of American higher education to collaborate with political repression. They, universities, do not fight back. They didn’t fight back during the McCarthy period. They’re not — were not fighting back, until this miracle. It really was a miracle, totally unexpected, of the president at Harvard saying, “No, I cannot go along with what you were asking.” And what they were —
AMY GOODMAN: The Jewish president at Harvard, right?
ELLEN SCHRECKER: He’s Jewish, right.
AMY GOODMAN: Alan Garber, who President Trump is accusing of antisemitism.
ELLEN SCHRECKER: Well, of course, we’re all antisemites, as long as we feel that maybe you shouldn’t be killing babies in Gaza every day.
But what we’re seeing is the beginning of a pushback against what Trump is doing, what his entire apparatus of hoodlums, I think, is trying to do to the universities. And that wonderful quote you had from Secretary of State Rubio, when he said, you know, paraphrasing these supposed terrorists, that they wanted to shut down the universities, he’s doing more to shut down the universities than probably anybody else in America at this moment.
AMY GOODMAN: Threatening to revoke the visas of all —
ELLEN SCHRECKER: Exactly.
AMY GOODMAN: — international students. What about the role of your organization, the AAUP, the American Association of University Professors?
ELLEN SCHRECKER: Right. We are a group that is over a hundred years old. And when we were founded, it was a period very much like today, where outsiders, politicians and especially very wealthy businesspeople on boards of trustees, were interfering with what faculty members were saying and doing with regard to — at that point, there was a lot of labor unrest and attempts to create unions. And university professors were sort of saying, “Well, look at the working conditions under which American workers are being oppressed. Let’s do something about industrial accidents and things like that.” Today, we’re seeing that, in every way, the federal government, state legislators interfering with the academic work of university professors. And that is what my organization is trying to do, is to protect the integrity and the educational value of what goes on on American campuses.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you hold out hope, in this last minute we have together?
ELLEN SCHRECKER: Yes, because, unfortunately, we have no model we can follow from McCarthyism, because there was no pushback, but today we’re seeing people marching to commencement at Harvard wearing labels saying, you know, “Enough is enough, President Trump. “We’re seeing huge crowds showing up to welcome Mohsen coming back from Vermont after having been picked up by ICE.
We’re seeing a growing movement within civil society, that has to be maintained, and has to be maintained for years. I mean, the damage that the Trump administration is doing is absolutely beyond the pale and has never, never been equaled in American life with regard to higher education. So, we’ve got to get out there in the trenches and even begin to think some more about: OK, if they’re not paying attention to the judges, if the Supreme Court folds — and let us pray that it does not — what do we have to do?
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, Ellen Schrecker, author of Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, also the author of The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom. We’ll link to your piece in The Nation headlined “Worse Than McCarthyism: Universities in the Age of Trump,” as well as Jelani Cobb’s piece in The New Yorker that extensively quotes you, Ellen Schrecker, at democracynow.org.
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franta weaponizing econ:
Bernstein, who deserves credit for shedding light on this issue, notes that Charles River Associates’ work was not entirely outside the mainstream. Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates, another consulting firm hired by the petroleum industry, also predicted high costs for climate policies (WEFA 1997, 1998). Perhaps most significantly, Bernstein observes that Charles River Associates’ work was similar to work done by other modeling groups such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, which is also funded by fossil fuel companies, and that both Charles River Associates and the Joint Program participated in Stanford University's Energy Modeling Forum, which again is funded by fossil fuel companies.:{8:(style="box-sizing:border-box;position:relative;vertical-align:baseline;top:-0.5em"):}:
6. Conclusion
For decades, the fossil fuel industry has hired economic consultants to help weaken and delay US and international climate policy. Among them, the economic consultants of Charles River Associates played a key role,helping to undermine carbon pricing, international climate agreements, and other climate policies from the early 1990s onward. The work of these economists was often portrayed to the public as independent, when in fact it was funded by the fossil fuel industry, and their models were incomplete and biased in favor of continued fossil fuel use. Yet their conclusions often passed without challenge and eventually came to represent a significant part of conventional economic wisdom.
Research on the climate change counter-movement has traditionally focused on documenting the promotion of disinformation regarding climate science (Brulle 2014, Franta 2021). While such disinformation has played a crucial role in delaying effective climate policy, the fossil fuel industry and broader climate change counter-movement have also made frequent use of economic arguments to justify inaction. At the same time, the fossil fuel industry has made substantial investments in influential climate economics programs across the US. Further attention is needed on the role of economists and particular economic paradigms, doctrines, and models within climate politics and the perpetuation of fossil fuels.
MIT is collaborating with a Chinese company called iFlytek, which supplied voice recognition technology to Xinjiang. By the way, this is why we're using a voice actor for Alim. China has his voice now. And engineers at NPR told us, even if we tried distorting Alim's voice to protect his identity, it could be reverse-engineered.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/bolivia-coup-was-based-on-false-claims-of-election-fraud/
no lnx
Bolivia coup was based on false claims of election fraud
Written by Eoin Higgins / Common Dreams February 28, 2020
A new study released by a pair of MIT researchers Thursday reveals that, contrary to claims from the U.S.-backed Organization of American States, there was no fraud in Bolivia’s Oct. 20, 2019 elections — an accusation used by the OAS and others as a pretext for supporting the coup in the country that deposed President Evo Morales and replaced him with an unelected right-wing government.
“Good lord,” tweeted MSNBC journalist Chris Hayes. “Given the fact the entire Morales government was toppled over accusations of election fraud, the OAS has a lot to answer for.”
The Intercept’s Jon Schwarz took a similar approach to the findings and the OAS’ conclusions.
Jon Schwarz
@schwarz
In a surprising development, it appears that the same political forces and media that have lied about absolutely everything about Latin America for the past 100 years were lying againhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/26/bolivia-dismissed-its-october-elections-fraudulent-our-research-found-no-reason-suspect-fraud/ …
Analysis | Bolivia dismissed its October elections as fraudulent. Our research found no reason to...
Bolivians will hold a new election in May — without ousted President Evo Morales.
washingtonpost.com
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9:01 AM - Feb 27, 2020
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MIT researchers John Curiel and Jack R. Williams reviewed the OAS report on the election for the Washington Post and found that the “election irregularities” cited by the group were based on “problematic” statistical claims. The OAS report rested its claim on the assumption that these so-called irregularities gave Morales a boost in numbers that raised his results over 10% higher than any other candidate, precluding a runoff election.
The researchers say they requested a response from the OAS about their findings, but received no reply.
Curiel and Williams’ study was commissioned by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). The group’s co-director, Mark Weisbrot, said in a statement that the OAS has a lot of explaining to do after facilitating the coup through faulty information.
“The OAS greatly misled the media and the public about what happened in Bolivia’s elections, and helped to foster a great deal of mistrust in the electoral process and the results,” said Weisbrot.
The orgnaization’s report bolstered the accusations of fraud in the Nov. 10 OAS report that precipitated the coup and the institution of hard-right legislator Jeanine Añez as president. The ensuing unrest and threats against he and his family, as Common Dreams reported at the time, forced Morales to flee the country for Mexico.
According to Curiel and Williams, the data used by OAS doesn’t line up with the organization’s conclusion:
Our results were straightforward. There does not seem to be a statistically significant difference in the margin before and after the halt of the preliminary vote. Instead, it is highly likely that Morales surpassed the 10-percentage-point margin in the first round. …
There is not any statistical evidence of fraud that we can find— the trends in the preliminary count, the lack of any big jump in support for Morales after the halt, and the size of Morales’ margin all appear legitimate. All in all, the OAS’ statistical analysis and conclusions would appear deeply flawed.
CEPR’s Weisbrot declared the researchers’ findings troubling and questioned the OAS’ credibility.
“This important analysis from MIT election researchers is the latest to show that the OAS’ statements were without basis, and that simple arithmetic shows that there is no evidence that fraud or irregularities affected the preliminary results, or the official results ? the ones that actually matter,” Weisbrot said. “The OAS needs to explain why it made these statements and why anyone should trust it when it comes to elections.”
“So much for that Bolivian election fraud,” tweeted the Intercept’s Ryan Grim.
The OAS is set to monitor new national elections in Bolivia set for May 3. Morales, still in exile, has effectively been barred from running.
Williams told Common Dreams that his and Curiel’s findings cast doubt on the organization’s impartiality and ability to act as a neutral arbiter.
“The OAS’s report has basic methodological and statistical errors that make it difficult to see the OAS as an impartial election observer,” said Williams. “The fact that they did not respond to researchers asking about their report on Bolivia seems to suggest they know this.”
National Nurses United director of communications Charles Idelson said on Twitter that the findings throw cold water on an attack line deployed by right-wing opponents of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, who have used his statement at Tuesday’s debate that the U.S. meddles in other countries against him.
“The fraudulent right wing military coup in Bolivia was carried out with Trump administration support,” said Idelson, “but some apparently still pretend the U.S. never overthrows governments of other countries.”
Curiel and Williams also point to the role in the media for uncritically regurgitating OAS claims on face value as the coup against Morales’ Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS-IPSP) party was underway.
“The media has largely reported the allegations of fraud as fact,” the researchers write. “And many commentators have justified the coup as a response to electoral fraud by MAS-IPSP.”
Utah-based progressive activist Tom Taylor called for accountability on the part of the media.
“Our news outlets took what known liars like John Bolton said about Morales at face value,” said Taylor. “Zero critical thinking. The journalists were old enough to remember when we were lied into the Iraq War.”
“There’s no other way to put it,” Taylor added. “Our media supported a coup.”
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used against uigurs
MIT is collaborating with a Chinese company called iFlytek, which suppliedvoice recognition technologyto Xinjiang. By the way, this is why we're using a voice actor for Alim. China has his voice now. And engineers at NPR told us, even if we tried distorting Alim's voice to protect his identity, it could be reverse-engineered.
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06032017/climate-change-denial-scientists-richard-lindzen-mit-donald-trump
Richard Lindzen, an outspoken climate contrarian and retired Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, sent a letter last month to President Donald Trump urging him to pull the United States out of the United Nations' climate change regime because global climate action is "not scientifically justified."
After MIT's climate researchers and faculty found out, they wrote their own open letter to the president, setting the record straight.
"As [Lindzen's] colleagues at MIT in the Program in Atmospheres, Oceans and Climate, all of whom are actively involved in understanding climate, we write to make it clear that this is not a view shared by us, or by the overwhelming majority of other scientists who have devoted their professional lives to careful study of climate science," said the March 2 letter, signed by 22 current and retired MIT professors.
The MIT staff addressed specific inaccuracies in Lindzen's letter, including his assertion that "carbon dioxide is not a pollutant."
"The risks to the Earth system associated with increasing levels of carbon dioxide are almost universally agreed by climate scientists to be real ones," they wrote. "These include, but are not limited to, sea level rise, ocean acidification, and increases in extreme flooding and droughts, all with serious consequences for mankind."
Lindzen responded to InsideClimate News with a one-page statement that echoed the contrarian points he made in his letter. He also criticized MIT's climate program. Lindzen has spent years downplaying the significance of man-made climate change through his published research, testimony in lawsuits and appearances before Congress. He has compared "global warming believers" to a "cult," and called the most recent assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world's leading climate science body, "a political document." He served as a meteorology professor from 1983 to 2013. He is nowa distinguished senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based conservative think tank.
"Since MIT's administration has made the climate issue a major focus for the Institute with the Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate (PAOC) playing a central role, it is not surprising that the department would object to any de-emphasis of this issue," Lindzen wrote. "For far too long, one body of men, establishment climate scientists, has been permitted to be judges and parties on what the 'risks to the Earth system associated with increasing levels of carbon dioxide' really are," he said, referencing something James Madison wrote in 1787.
A petition accompanying Lindzen's letter was signed by 300 other people. Lindzen described the signatories as "eminent scientists and other qualified individuals" in his letter. A review of the names by the Guardian, however, revealed few biology, chemistry, climate, earth and physics scientists. Many are well-known climate contrarians and deniers. They include Willie Soon, an aerospace engineer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; Steve Goreham of the Heartland Institute, an industry backed organization that denies climate science; and William Briggs, a statistician at Cornell University who questions climate models.
"In stark contrast to Lindzen's letter, ours was signed only by those who know something about the climate system," said Kerry Emanuel, an MIT professor of atmospheric sciences who signed the letter opposing Lindzen.
The science advocacy group the Union of Concerned Scientist also annotated the letterto point out its errors.
The MIT letter noted that professional societies including the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union have all released statements affirming the scientific consensus on man-made climate change and its grave risks. A recent analysis found that 140 of the world's national academies and top scientific geosciences, biological, chemical, physical, agricultural and other organizations have issued statements about human-caused warming.
"We owe it to future generations to remain engaged with the international community to seek the widest possible efforts to understand and mitigate [climate change] threats," the letter said.
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Inside Higher Ed
http://insideclimatenews.org/news/2910**2015**/MIT-Exxon-partnership-climate-action-vow-test
massachusetts Institute of Technology last week denounced campaigns led by fossil fuel companies to obstruct public understanding of climate science and vowed to “advocate frankly” with industry allies for climate solutions as part of a new climate action plan. But oil giant, long-time collaborator and university funder ExxonMobil, which is charged with sowing doubt on climate change in a recent InsideClimate News investigation, puts MIT's commitment to the test.
MIT made its vow in "A Plan for Action on Climate Change," an 18-page report released Oct. 21. In it, the university said it will engage and collaborate with fossil fuel companies to combat climate change rather than divest its stock holdings in these companies.
As part of its decision to not divest, MIT took a seemingly hard line on the issue of climate denial when it said: "We are not naïve about the pernicious role of some segments of the fossil fuel industry in creating the current policy deadlock. We deplore the practice of 'disinformation,' through which some industry players and related groups have obstructed public understanding of the problem of climate change."
MIT went on to say it has already had "candid conversations" with industry allies and will continue "to advocate frankly" with them to work toward solutions.
While MIT vice president of research Maria Zuber told InsideClimate News that MIT “means business” and that "climate change is an institutional priority," some members of the MIT community remain unconvinced.
The student group Fossil Free MIT said the engagement plan amounted to "little more than business-as-usual repackaged," in a recent op-ed in the student newspaper, The Tech, on Thursday. Members of the group have led a sit-in outside of MIT President L. Rafael Reif's office for the past nine days in protest of the divestment decision and are asking for clarification on the engagement process. Approximately 3,500 students signed a petition last year asking the administration to divest; 90 faculty members also signed an open letter supporting divestment.
"I think it is inconsistent with our mission for MIT to invest in the enterprises that are helping to create the climate problem and also many of them are funding the disinformation campaigns that led to denial and confusion and prevent the adoption of policies we need for the climate problem," John Sterman, a professor the Jay W. Forrester Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and director of MIT's System Dynamics Group, told InsideClimate News. "We need to stand with science. We need to stand with integrity."
Sterman added that he is not against working with energy companies, but only after companies prove they are not opposing policies needed to respond to climate change and are sincere about building a low-carbon economy.
In the climate action report's executive summary, MIT offered one example of how the fossil fuel industry may already be at a "tipping point," referring to a coalition of 10 oil and gas companies, including six members of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI), that recently supported the international goal of keeping global warming below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
Conspicuously absent from that list of energy companies, however, is ExxonMobil, a founding member of MITEI.
ICN's recent investigation revealed that the company's scientists conducted rigorous climate research between the late-1970s and mid-1980s, warned executives that global warming posed a threat to Exxon's core business. But beginning in the late 1980s, Exxon led a campaign tohighlight the uncertainty of climate science. An independent investigation by the Los Angeles Timescame to a similar conclusion.
MIT offered few details when asked if it believed Exxon had engaged in disinformation campaigns, how it has and how it plans to communicate with Exxon on this topic, and what it thought of the fact that Exxon had not supported the 2 degree warming goal.
"I’m not going to talk directly about Exxon," MIT's Maria Zuber told InsideClimate News. "As a rule we don't make pronouncements about details of our individual industry relationships."
But Zuber did offer some clarification on MIT's motivation for voicing such a strong opinion on disinformation campaigns and defended the engagement decision. In the leadup to the report, members of the Fossil Free group had "really raised the sense of urgency" of the climate issue on campus, she said. It was clear to the administration that business as usual "was not going to be adequate."
"It was important to say [to the rest of MIT] that what we really want to do is change the game. And by changing the game, that means engaging sectors in this solution space who maybe haven't been fully participating or participating in the way that we chose. So we made the conscious decision that we were better off trying to sit all these people around the table and to find common ground and to convey to them our urgency on this matter than to push them away and hope that that leads to action," she said.
But how will MIT know if its approach is working? Zuber told InsideClimate News that the administration is setting up benchmarks for tracking the potential success of engagement.
Walking a Fine Line
Two days after MIT released its climate action plan, Exxon rebuked the charges laid out in the recent InsideClimate News and Los Angeles Times investigations concerning its role in sowing doubt about climate change. As evidence of Exxon’s continued commitment to climate change, the company pointed to its relationship with MIT.
"The facts are that we identified the potential risks of climate change and have taken the issue very seriously," said Ken Cohen, vice president of public and government affairs at Exxon. "We embarked on decades of research in collaboration with many parties, including the Department of Energy, leading academic institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and others to advance climate science."
"There are a lot of people at MIT who are pretty disgruntled" about that, said Geoffrey Supran, an MIT graduate student and member of MIT Fossil Free. He said Exxon is using MIT "as a paintbrush to greenwash its climate lies."
"Instead of MIT using its name through actions like divestment to call out this disinformation, MIT is actually lending its name as a social license, even if it's unintentional," he said.
Zuber, however, said all of MIT’s partners have meaningfully contributed to the university's research and mission.
"When we look at any of these companies with whom we are engaging, what I care about is what they are doing right now and what they are going to do tomorrow and the next day to move this forward and to me, this out to be the benchmark of which we ought to judge the usefulness of these collaborations," she said.
Zuber later acknowledged that MIT is putting its "reputation on the line" by working with the companies.
MIT's action plan includes a commitment to reduce the university’s carbon footprint by at least 32 percent by 2030 as compared to 2014 levels, as well as provide more options to study climate change and sustainability in the classroom and through research.
In addition to declining to divest, the MIT administration rejected a proposal to form an Ethics Advisory Council. According to the MIT Climate Change Conservation Committee report, such a group would have examined issues such as disinformation campaigns through ethical lenses that are "antithetical to the Institute's central mission of education."
inside h ed no lnx
adrian S. Abbot, an associate professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, is speaking out against the cancellation of a lecture he was scheduled to give later this month at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He says he’s being punished for his views on higher education’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, which he’s referred to as a top-down “regime.”
“I view this episode as an example as well as a striking illustration of the threat woke ideology poses to our culture, our institutions and to our freedoms,” Abbot wrote in a guest post for former New York Times writer Bari Weiss’s Substack newsletter, which is becoming a go-to venue for professors who feel they’ve been wronged by the academic left. “I have consistently maintained that woke ideology is essentially totalitarian in nature: it attempts to corral the entirety of human existence into one narrow ideological viewpoint and to silence anyone who disagrees.”
MIT says that Abbot was disinvited from giving a planned public outreach lecture aimed, in part, at engaging local high school students. The university says it invited Abbot to campus to address fellow climate scientists about his research instead.
Abbot says that he was first targeted for “cancellation” by a group of graduate students in his department at Chicago, but that his detractors grew in number following the an opinion piece he wrote for Newsweek in August. That piece attacks academe’s increasing focus on DEI, saying it “violates the ethical and legal principle of equal treatment” and “entails treating people as members of a group rather than as individuals, repeating the mistake that made possible the atrocities of the 20th century.”
Abbot in Newsweek also proposed a supposedly novel framework called “Merit, Fairness, and Equality (MFE), whereby university applicants are treated as individuals and evaluated through a rigorous and unbiased process based on their merit and qualifications alone.” This would mean ending legacy and athletic admissions advantages, in addition to consideration of “group membership,” and involve “universities investing in education projects in neighborhoods where public education is failing to help children from those areas compete.” Such projects would be “evidence-based and non-ideological, testing a variety of different options such as increased public school funding, charter schools and voucher programs,” he said.
The John Carlson lecture at MIT, which Abbot was scheduled to deliver, is described as communicating “exciting new results in climate science to the general public.” Abbot, who had planned to discuss climate and the potential for life on other planets, said in Weiss’s Substack that this was a major career coup -- and that’s partly why a “Twitter mob” demanded that he be uninvited.
“It worked. And quickly,” he said of this criticism. The sponsoring department chair at MIT “called to tell me that they would be cancelling the Carlson lecture this year in order to avoid controversy.”
Abbot continued, “It’s worth stating what happened again: a small group of ideologues mounted a Twitter campaign to cancel a distinguished science lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology because they disagreed with some of the political positions the speaker had taken. And they were successful within eight days.”
Abbot also said on Twitter that the MIT program in question, in earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences, is a “great department full of excellent scientists who I admire and respect. The department chair ultimately made the decision to cancel my Carlson Lecture, not them. The chair is a good person, but made a bad decision under pressure in this case.”
MIT said in a statement that the public outreach Carlson lecture “will not be held this year at the discretion of the department. At the same time, Professor Abbot was invited by the department to present his scientific work on MIT’s campus to students and faculty. This was conveyed by the department head in a conversation with Professor Abbot last week.”
Abbot “embraced this offer,” MIT said, and he and the department are working on setting a date.
Abbot did not immediately respond to a request for comment about this second lecture opportunity. He did not mention a second invitation to talk at MIT in his Substack piece.
Robert van der Hilst, head of MIT’s earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences department, said in a separate statement that the Carlson lecture “isn’t a scientific talk for fellow scientists. It has a very specific format and public outreach component, seeking to build public understanding of climate science and to inspire andengage with area high school students.”
In this light, “We felt that with the current distractions we would not be in a position to hold an effective outreach event,” van der Hilst continued. “I made this decision at my discretion, after consulting with faculty and students in the department, and knowing that some might mistake it as an affront on academic freedom -- a characterization I do not agree with.”
Abbot disagrees, arguing that his canceled talk does have implications for academic freedom. Some of his supporters, including the Academic Freedom Alliance, have appealed to MIT to reschedule the Carlson lecture.
Anna Krylov, professor of chemistry at the University of Southern California, said via the alliance that Abbot’s “is an alarming case of scholarship suppression and censorship in STEM. This cancellation was facilitated by Twitter vigilantes and enabled by the complacency of the leadership of our institutions.”
MIT Cancels Geophysicist's Lecture After Activists' Outrage ...
Newsweek
see brunot
MIT Cancels Geophysicist's Lecture After Activists' Outrage Over His Views on Diversity. Massachusetts Institute of Technology canceled a lecture by geophysicist Dorian Abbot amid criticism of his views on campus diversity efforts.Oct 4, 2021
MIT Cancels Geophysicist's Lecture After Activists' Outrage Over His Views on Diversity
BY ANDREW STANTON ON 10/4/21
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology canceled a lecture by geophysicist Dorian Abbot amid criticism of his views on campus diversity efforts.
Abbot, who is an associate professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, received criticism from MIT academics over his views following aNewsweek opinion piece published in August.
In the opinion piece, Abbot and professor Ivan Marinovic criticized diversity, equity and inclusion standards as "treating people as members of a group rather than as individuals, repeating the mistake that made possible the atrocities of the 20th century."
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"It treats persons as merely means to an end, giving primacy to a statistic over the individuality of a human being," they wrote in the opinion piece.
His position over college diversity efforts sparked pushback from many academics on social media who said his rhetoric harms people of color in colleges and academia, some criticizing him for saying Nazi Germany also "drove scholars out" as "an ideological regime obsessed with race."
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"By the way, many of us from the same privileged groups that Dorian Abbot imagines he is defending are disgusted by his comments," wrote @henrifdrake. "We do not live in a meritocracy– DEI efforts are justified, necessary, and long overdue."
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"Imagine being a student/employee of color in an environment where someone like this is rewarded w/ one of the most prestigious platforms to speak," wrote @jeeminhrhim.
He was set to speak at the Carlson Lecture, which "communicates exciting new results in climate science to the general public," according to the MIT Earth Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences website.
On Sunday, he tweeted the lecture had been canceled.
"EAPS at MIT is a great department full of excellent scientists who I admire and respect. The department chair ultimately made the decision to cancel my Carlson Lecture, not them. The chair is a good person, but made a bad decision under pressure in this case," he wrote in a tweet."
He added, "I forgive the activists who led the campaign against me. Please do not attack them personally. They are fish swimming in a sea of moral confusion. Some of the responsibility for their behavior rests on their elders, who have not helped them form properly."
In a statement to Newsweek, MIT confirmed that the address would not be held this year at the discretion of EAPS, but that the university is later planning to allow Abbot to share his work with colleagues.
"Prof. Abbot was invited by the department to present his scientific work on MIT's campus to students and faculty, and has been working with colleagues at MIT to plan a date," the statement said.
Abbot wrote in a statement to Newsweek, "I want to continue my scientific relationships with the excellent scientists at EAPS at MIT. Hopefully, we can all learn from this experience how important it is to protect academic freedom and to keep science free of politics and ideology. This starts with making admission and appointment decisions solely on the basis of academic merit and extends to refusing to allow small groups of activists to censor viewpoints they disagree with."
https://www.newsweek.com › News › MIT › Colleg
At MIT, controversy over a canceled lecture
Inside Higher Ed
https://www.insidehighered.com › news › 2021/10/06
Oct 5, 2021 — A professor of climate science who opposed diversity initiatives cries foul over a canceled lecture. His supporters say this threatens science ...
MIT cancels geophysicist Dorian Abbot's lecture over ...
New York Post
https://nypost.com › 2021/10/05 › mit-cancels-geophy...
Oct 5, 2021 — Dorian Abbot accused MIT of “quickly” relenting to a Twitter campaign led by MIT students and recent alumni that demanded he be uninvited ...
Missing: pressure activists
MIT cancels Chicago geophysicist lecture under pressure ...
Karlstack
https://www.karlstack.com › mit-cancels-chicago-geophy...
Oct 4, 2021 — MIT cancels Chicago geophysicist lecture under pressure from twitter activists. "The west is dying a slow death. This is depressing to watch ...
"1/ Dorian Abbot is a geophysicist at the University ...
https://twitter.com › McCormickProf › status
Oct 3, 2021 — Shamefully, MIT canceled the lecture under pressure from activists who objected to his political views. 6:57 PM · Oct 3, 2021.
Christina Hoff Sommers on Twitter: "MIT cancelled a lecture ...
https://twitter.com › CHSommers › status
Shamefully, MIT canceled the lecture under pressure from activists who objected to his political views. Show this thread. 3:07 PM · Oct 4, 2021.
the canceling of Dr. Dorian Abbot's Carlson Lecture is. Let's ...
https://twitter.com › McCormickProf › status
7/ MIT alumni, please make your voices heard on the Institute's shameful capitulation to political pressure to cancel the 2021 Carlson Lecture by University of ...
"4/ MIT's caving in to a cancel mob's demand to disinvite a ...
https://twitter.com › McCormickProf › status
Oct 3, 2021 — 7/ MIT alumni, please make your voices heard on the Institute's shameful capitulation to political pressure to cancel the 2021 Carlson Lecture ...
that education should be about the pursuit of truth ...
https://twitter.com › EconTalker › status
Oct 3, 2021 — I would rephrase this. His lecture was cancelled because of his views on education--that education should be about the pursuit of truth.
Academic lecture at MIT canceled after outraging ...
Daily Mail
https://www.dailymail.co.uk › news › article-10058861
Oct 5, 2021 — Leading geophysicist had prestigious lecture at MIT canceled after outraging 'totalitarian' Twitter mob by arguing that academic evaluations ...
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