Hackademics
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MERRI OK
HACKademics are sellouts with university affiliations: Entine and John Graham are prototypes, Stare pioneer Harvard, HAPPER
crypto? trying to neutraize or destroy real scientists and acAdemics?
lots are economists like laffer
see atrazine, syngenta, roundup monsanto
VS HACKS WHO PRETEND TO BE CLI SCI, AND WILL INFLATE/DISTORT CREDENTIALS; A FEW SELLOUTS HAVE LEGIT CREDENTIALS: CURRY, LINDZEN ETC
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NOTE HE DOES NOT NAME HACKS
mma
August 19, 2025, edition of The Charlie Kirk Show SALEM
CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): You've taken on the entire kind of climate science world. Energy department attacks climate science in contentious report. By the way, you're in safe company here. We think this is all politicized. This is driven towards a environmentalist agenda that is trying to weaken American energy dominance. The agency asked five client skeptics to write a report criticizing the consensus on global warming.
First of all, science does not have consensus. This is a very important thing. Right? Science says nothing. Scientists say things. Okay? Science never talks. Science is silent. This is a good thing that could apply to everything. Scientists say things. And scientists, like we learned during COVID, we learned during the lockdowns, learned during the vaccines, can say a lot of different things with the data.
Now, again, global warming does not have consensus like the second law of thermodynamics. Global warming does not have consensus like a object at rest will stay at rest. Your reaction, Mr. Secretary, and how you think about this because they — again, let me read this New York Times article, The consensus on global warming. What an outrageous claim. Your thoughts, sir.
CHRIS WRIGHT (GUEST): Yeah. I always give the contrast between the science, which is what the left likes, which is the opposite of science. Science is a process of challenge and engagement and debate and wrestling with data. And if the data doesn't agree with your model, your model is wrong. Where the science is this top-down, authority-driven thing used with COVID to me was the climate movement in fast forward. The science told you what to do.
But as you said, Charlie, look at those critics. They critique the authors. Five skeptics. Well, skeptical of what? They presented — these are five highly distinguished scientists. One of them was undersecretary for science in the Obama administration, provost at Caltech, PhD from MIT. All of those scientists were accomplished scientists that are also tired of this censorship of the science, censoring real science and real process of engagement. But even on my CNN interview a couple weeks ago, I went on to talk about the climate report. There are zero questions about climate change. Zero. They want to impugn the writers or impugn the way we reference people. They want to find little things. What we want to talk about is the data.
Let's talk about climate science. Like, it's a real phenomenon. It's a slow-moving phenomenon, not even remotely close to the world's biggest problem, but it's used by the left to justify big government and top-down control of everything. Let's be honest. Let's engage in real science, as you said. That's what we're about. And I'm excited to have that debate over four years. We're going to end a lot of children's nightmares. We're going to end a lot of people trying to be pushed around and bullied by people that don't know what they're talking about. Like, I've spent twenty years studying climate science as physical data, and the people who were passionate about it never want to debate me because they don't know anything about it. But we're going to have that debate whether they want it or not.
KIRK: Science is a process. It doesn't tell you anything. People tell you. Science is a method. It's a methodology. And good science, which again is a verb, they they act as if, well, science, you know, puts something out. No. You do science. You go in exploration of truth. And then once you have a conclusion, you have to measure it, you have to analyze it, you have to inquire it, you have to cross-reference it. And by the way, we're bringing back that methodology to our government, RFK at HHS, and you at the Department of Energy.
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WHO ARE 3%?
Table 7 shows authors of the aforementioned publications who appeared in our sample. We also note who meets climate expert criteria. Collectively, these publications illustrate one waya small, yet prominent, cohort works to expand the contrarian movement through the guise of academic research.
...[table]
Affiliations
A total of 82 per cent of all individuals in our dataset, including 100 per cent of individuals deemed climate experts, have affiliations with industries and/or organizations involved in the CCCM(Björnberg et al. Reference Björnberg2017; Brulle Reference Brulle2014; Dunlap and Jacques Reference Dunlap and Jacques2013; McCright and Dunlap Reference McCright and Dunlap2011a; McCright et al. Reference McCright2016; Oreskes and Conway Reference Oreskes and Conway2010; Plehwe Reference Plehwe2014. Of the 82 per cent, we found: (1) 69 per cent have affiliation(s) with conservative think tanks, conservative religious groups, and/or organized causes dedicated to the rejection of the climate consensus;(2) 11 per cent have affiliation(s) with both think tanks/groups/causes and CCCM-related industries (for example, fossil fuel, mining, and utility companies); and (3) another 2 per cent have affiliation(s) just with CCCM-related industries.}:
Table 8 shows the number of affiliations with CCCM organizations that appeared in our data. Table 9 shows industry affiliations. Each corporation/company appeared just once, with the exceptions of ExxonMobil (seven), Peabody (four), Shell (four), and Western Fuels Association (three). Evaluating these companies/corporations is beyond the scope of this article; however, like other demographic information and affiliations, these affiliations may provide insight into contrarians' background and views. [i really want this table 8]
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HAPPER 320 poster boy for? physics? hack? HACKADEMIC? he's the mainline channel from denial to trump white house, block congress testimony? [transparency]
omfg gets better trump gig
see heartland, sci suppress 3, house intel comm
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new
note coherent long term strategy!
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https://www.alternet.org/big-oil-colonized-college-campuses/
no lnx
environmentalists are not hard to find on college campuses, and many of them are sounding the alarm about the dangers of climate change. Terms like "green energy" and "carbon footprint" are not uncommon at universities.
But not everyone who lectures about climate change on campus has a plan for fighting it. In an article published by The Guardian on March 27, journalist Oliver Milman details the fossil fuel industry's efforts to promote its agenda on college campuses.
:{:{}:
Milman cites Tim Barckholtz as an example. Barckholtz has lectured extensively at Princeton University in New Jersey about the challenges of moving away from fossil fuels, but he is a scientific adviser for ExxonMobil.}:
READ MORE:'You've got to be kidding me': MSNBC host spooked by revelation that climate change is making fungus deadlier
"Dozens of U.S. universities…. retain links with the fossil fuel industry in a variety of ways, despite the growing pressure on them to cut them," Milman explains. "Several host Exxon representatives on campus and even provide them with office space, similar to Princeton's previous arrangement, a Guardian investigation has found."
Princeton student Claire Kaufman told The Guardian she was "quite shocked" to find out that Barckholtz worked for ExxonMobil.
According to Kaufman, "The fact there was an Exxon employee in this undergrad class blew my mind. It's weird and problematic. He then took the class, but the biggest issue is that public opinion is against Exxon. So, they are looking to install themselves as impartial-looking bodies in classrooms."
The student added, "This is not a neutral industry. It has an agenda; it wants to shape the conversation around climate change and energy. They aren't putting people in classrooms for fun."
READ MORE:'Inequality kills': Author Naomi Klein explains why climate change is an 'economic justice' issue
:{:{According to Georgia Tech student Evan Montoya, ExxonMobil has a presence on that campus as well.}:
Montoya told The Guardian, "I see something with Exxon on it once a week, at least. They have a very evident presence on campus. They definitely have a substantial influence here."}:
For decades, the late far-right radio host Rush Limbaugh claimed that climate change was a myth and was a cheerleader for fossil fuels (Limbaugh also claimed that there was no link between cigarettes and lung cancer, which was the cause of his death in 2021). But these days, allies of the fossil fuel industry don't necessarily claim that climate change doesn't exist; instead, they might acknowledge that it's a reality but say that fossil fuels aren’t a major cause.
Milman reports, "Even as elite American universes such as Harvard have bowed to pressure to divest their multibillion-dollar endowments from fossil fuels, and student activists take recalcitrant holdouts to court, oil and gas companies continue to exert a grip upon campus life, through funded research and the physical presence of oil and gas industry employees in lectures and meetings with faculty.Fossil-fuel firms have purposely sought to 'colonize' academia with industry-friendly science, rather than seed overt climate denial, according to Ben Franta, a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford who has studied industry's influence over universities."
READ MORE:Texas agriculture agency: Climate change threatening state's food supply
Read The Guardian's full report at this link.
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ref guk
https://yyy.theguardian.com/education/2023/mar/27/fossil-fuel-firms-us-universities-colonize-academia
students at Princeton describe unease that Exxon employee had an office on campus, while dozens of universities have big oil links
:{:{Mon 27 Mar 2023}:
the lecturer looked, and sounded, the part. Sporting a pale blue shirt and Princeton University ID badge, he had his own office on campus, a short stroll from the room where several dozen students were gathered to hear him confidently talk about the challenges in moving away from fossil fuels.}:
Tim Barckholtz is not a Princeton professor, however. He is a senior scientific adviser at ExxonMobil, the oil giant that has done so much to both perpetuate and downplay the climate crisis. Barckholtz, an affable figure who has
touting its emissions reduction research, spent around six months sitting in and contributing to lectures and research groups, based in his own office space at the elite university.
In September, with the university poised to cut its extensive ties with certain fossil-fuel companies including Exxon, Barckholtz even taught a class of engineering students on “negative emissions technologies”, during which, over pizza and soda, he criticized the divestment decision, warned that the transition away from oil and gas will be “very difficult” and that the unfolding climate emergency was “not our fault”.
“It’s hard for me to figure out who wins [from divestment],” Barckholtz told the class, a recording of it shows. “There are, like, 10 people who win. They are sleeping better at night, but technology is the loser.” Barckholtz then noted that Exxon makes the type of rubber that goes into most car tires. “Are all of the Princeton security cars going to go back to the Flintstones and have no tires?” he asked. “There are some parts of this they didn’t think through completely.”
Asked by a student about the Paris climate agreement, Barckholtz expressed doubt that it could be met, as it was too hard to ditch fossil fuels. “I’m not optimistic, I’m going to call it the way I see it,” he said. “The system is just too big to be flipped.”
“A few of the students thought it was weird he was in the class and that he then taught the class,” said Claire Kaufman, a second year master’s student in public affairs who said she started talking to Barckholtz during one of the first negative emissions technology classes and was “quite shocked” to discover he was an Exxon employee.
Dozens of US universities, however, retain links with the fossil-fuel industry in a variety of ways, despite the growing pressure on them to cut them. Several host Exxon representatives on campus and even provide them with office space, similar to Princeton’s previous arrangement, a Guardian investigation has found.
According to Kaufman, Barckholtz told her Exxon had no interest in renewable energy – aside from, perhaps, offshore wind – beyond using it as a public relations exercise, and that he was looking to fund the work of the professor whose class he sat in. He showed her his Princeton office space, which included a list of a dozen Exxon-funded research projects on a whiteboard.
He later told the class that he was there to “scout out” useful things for Exxon’s nearby research center in New Jersey, and that the company has had someone, like him, monitoring Princeton classes for the previous five years. (In 2015, Princeton said it was “delighted” to forge a new “e-filliates” partnership with Exxon). Barckholtz did not respond to questions from the Guardian over his role at Princeton.
“The fact there was an Exxon employee in this undergrad class blew my mind,” said Kaufman, who is also an organizer at the Divest Princeton group. “It’s weird and problematic he then took the class, but the biggest issue is that public opinion is against Exxon so they are looking to install themselves as impartial-looking bodies in classrooms.
“This is not a neutral industry. It has an agenda, it wants to shape the conversation around climate change and energy. They aren’t putting people in classrooms for fun.”
Barckholtz has since vacated his office, following Princeton’s announcement on 29 September that 90 companies, including Exxon, would not only be divested from its endowment but also would have research funding ties cut, following years of pressure from students for Princeton to follow other major universities in dropping fossil-fuel investments.
But Exxon, which is among a group of oil and gas companies that have funneled more than $700m into research partnerships with leading US universities since 2010, still maintains close ties to dozens of universities, and has a regular on-campus presence at a clutch of prestigious colleges.
At MIT, Exxon is provided office space through its funding of the MIT Energy Initiative research collaboration, and company representatives “come to campus from time to time to meet with principal investigators who are doing sponsored research and student fellows they sponsor”, a university spokesperson said.
Ellie Rabenold, an engineering student and part of the MIT Divest group, said she was unaware that Exxon had office space at her university, and that divestment is a “touchy subject” for members of the faculty that have been bankrolled by various fossil-fuel-funded initiatives. In 2019, an auditorium at MIT was set to be named after Shell, another oil company, until a student and faculty backlash forced a rethink.
Exxon researchers do not have their own office space at Stanford, a university Exxon has given $120m to over the past two decades for climate and energy research, although the company’s researchers are often seen on campus. At other universities, Exxon employees are present at jobs fairs, or as guest speakers or to treat students to meals.
“I see something with Exxon on it once a week, at least.They have a very evident presence on campus,” said Evan Montoya, a third-year student at Georgia Tech. “They definitely have a substantial influence here.”
Even as elite American universes such as Harvard have bowed to pressure to divest their multibillion-dollar endowments from fossil fuels, and student activists take recalcitrant holdouts to court, oil and gas companies continue to exert a grip upon campus life, through funded research and the physical presence of oil and gas industry employees in lectures and meetings with faculty.
Fossil-fuel firms have purposely sought to “colonize” academia with industry-friendly science, rather than seed overt climate denial, according to Ben Franta, a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford who has studied industry’s influence over universities.
Their research dollars, he said, had effectively discouraged academic endeavors that challenge the core business model of burning oil and gas, instead shifting the focus to favored topics such as capturing carbon emissions from polluting facilities, a still niche technology that would allow industry to continue business as usual.
[pix Barckholtz at Princeton in an office and in a university class. Photograph: Divest Princeton
“When you have these companies in class and on campus, it’s like an audition for academics to get research grants,” Franta said. “Sometimes a researcher who’s funded by industry does drift into an anti-industry posture, and then they just cut off their funding. You have professors who will quietly say: ‘I think divestment is a great idea, but I can’t support it because I’ll lose my research funding from oil companies.’
“A standard strategy that industries under threat try is to influence what gets studied and what doesn’t get studied, and how the problem is framed. The tobacco industry did the same thing. For Exxon to have someone with an office at Princeton, and for that person to teach a class, is a shocking example of this.”
The reach of fossil fuels into academia “never ceases to amaze me”, said Robert Brulle, an environmental sociologist at Brown University. “You can barely study climate change at elite universities and not be funded by fossil-fuel companies,” he added. “They drive all this study into carbon capture, so that influences policy and becomes a part of the Biden administration’s agenda. The influence is profound, and the students are right to be wondering what kind of education they are getting here.”
Researchers have stressed that proper academic guardrails ensure no funder dictates outcomes they desire and that important, scientifically sound studies have come from work backed by arm’s-length fossil-fuel interests. Exxon has financed studies and research groups into areas such as carbon capture and dangerous chemical exposures, often alongside other independent researchers.
princeton denies Exxon has had an undue influence over the university’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment,which has received fossil-fuel funding and has produced annual reports in which Exxon expresses gratitude for “access to extraordinary talent and facilities”. Barckholtz sat in some class meetings but “did not play a role in developing the course or its learning objectives”, a Princeton spokesperson said.
Barckholtz was a “fun and productive collaborator” on a project to burn biomass such as forests for energy and capture and bury the resulting emissions, said Eric Larson, a senior researcher at the Andlinger Center. More than a dozen Exxon-funded research projects at Princeton, including work on technologies to offset or capture carbon emissions, will have to be funded by other means itself following the disassociation, a move that Larson considers unnecessary and potentially counterproductive.
“We chose the project, and Exxon was interested enough to support it. My research agenda isn’t impacted at all by who is funding it,” Larson said. “I’m OK with taking Exxon stock out from the Princeton endowment – that’s a way to make a statement – but this was taking research money away from work designed to decarbonize our society as rapidly as possible. We need everyone inside the tent to solve this problem, including the fossil-fuel industry.”
An Exxon spokesperson said that the company “enjoyed a long and fruitful relationship with Princeton, but it has become clear that there are individuals associated with the university who are choosing to put their individual views above the opportunity to accelerate the energy transition we all seek”
Exxon, which has provided more than $10.7m in research funding to Princeton over the past 10 years, had more than 25 research projects with the university, the company spokesperson added.
But even Princeton has not jettisoned all fossil-fuel partners. Its Carbon Mitigation Initiative will continue to be financed by BP, which has given $26.4m to the university over the past decade and does not fall under the precise terms of the divestment, which was only aimed at companies with coal or tar sands assets, rather than all oil firms.
Other oil and gas companies, such as Shell, may even join as partners under these terms in a new “energy research fund”. Princeton’s ties to the industry are deep and historical – letters buried in the university’s library archive show its leadership aggressively courted Exxon in the 1970s, complaining in one instance it has “not received its fair share from Exxon”.One PhD student told the Guardian she was almost certain her work was being funded by fossil fuels, but that she had not received a straight answer from the university over this.
Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton climate scientist, said he was disappointed the university’s trustees did not enact a divestment broad enough to also evict businesses such as BP, but that it is difficult to criticize researchers for getting funding where they can.
"They have to live with whatever decisions they make. I try to not judge others,” he said. “Personally, I would never take a penny from Exxon due to their disinformation on climate change. You can talk to the devil sometimes, but you don’t have to take to take money from the devil, and the devil is Exxon.”
The presence of carbon-intensive industries in Princeton classrooms has not dissipated, either. Two weeks ago, a class called Oil, Energy and the Middle East featured a guest appearance from Sheikh Nawaf Saud Al Sabah, chief executive of the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation, who told the gathered students that “we are never going to get out of fossil fuels: we need them for plastics and medicine … we are too reliant upon them”, according to Frida Ruiz, a sophomore in mechanical engineering who took the class.
Just before the class, Ruiz was perusing the shared class materials on a Princeton phone app, and saw a professor had posted a cartoon mocking supporters of fossil-fuel divestment, showing them near-naked and befuddled without any of the modern appliances that require fossil fuels.
“I thought, ‘Huh, I guess I now have a sense of what this class is going to be like,’” Ruiz said, adding she heard later it was meant as an example of industry propaganda.
:{:{}:
Are you a student at a US university where fossil fuels industry staffers have an on campus presence? If so we would like to hear from you. Contact oliver.milman@theguardian.com
}:
Topics
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wapo
Health & Science
White House prepares to scrutinize intelligence agencies’ finding that climate change threatens national security
The proposed Presidential Committee on Climate Security is being spearheaded by William Happer, a National Security Council senior director.
The proposed Presidential Committee on Climate Security is being spearheaded by William Happer, a National Security Council senior director. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
By
Juliet Eilperin and
Missy Ryan
Feb. 20, 2019
The White House is working to assemble a panel to assess whether climate change poses a national security threat, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post, a conclusion that federal intelligence agencies have affirmed several times since President Trump took office.
The proposed Presidential Committee on Climate Security, which would be established by executive order, is being spearheaded by William Happer, a National Security Council senior director. Happer, an emeritus professor of physics at Princeton University, has said that carbon emissions linked to climate change should be viewed as an asset rather than a pollutant....
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drilled panel 10 22 got 25$K to dispute beef = transpo [meme], has branched out, cashed in
eg artl
no lnx
Is GWP* really 'fuzzy math?' You decide.
October 20, 2021
By Frank Mitloehner
Has the beef industry landed on a metric that finally gives it a rosy glow? Is a new system of measurement absolving the sector from much of the global warming blame it’s been shouldering? And if so, is it all too good to be true?
According to a recent article in Bloomberg Green, the author contends that GWP star (GWP*), which some would argue is an improved way to measure the warming effect of greenhouse gases, is a sweetheart deal for methane-producing sectors such as animal agriculture. In fact, beef and dairy might even be dipping a hoof in conspiracy waters with the metric that comes to us from University of Oxford.
If you’re reading this, you likely know the conversation around cows and climate is a contentious one. It’s often charged and emotional, and expectedly so. That’s what happens when discussions touch on things that are highly personal and steeped in tradition. From our culture to our rituals to our upbringing to our health, food is so much more than nourishment. It also plays a role in our environment, and if we’re talking about red meat, this is where the argument typically begins.
I’ve dedicated my professional life to reducing the environmental impact of animal agriculture. Though I’m not a climate scientist, a large portion of my work focuses on quantifying greenhouse gases from cattle and other livestock, which is why my Twitter handle is @GHGGuru and not @ClimateGuru (who happens to be a lawyer for the National Wildlife Federation – go figure). Throughout the year, you can find me on farms or in one of our facilities at UC Davis, overseeing the measurement of greenhouse gas emissions from cattle.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/the-art-of-scientific-deception-former-assistant-secretary-of-labor-explains-how-corporations-use-mercenary-science-to-whitewash-harmful-products-and-drugs/
no lnx
The art of scientific deception: Former Assistant Secretary of Labor explains how corporations use ‘mercenary science’ to whitewash harmful products
Written by Keith A. Spencer / Salon February 2, 2020
One curious difference between humans and corporations is our capacity to harm others and emerge unscathed. If you or I were to poison someone on camera in broad daylight, we would be given a trial and sent to prison in a hurry. But if you or I were a corporation, we could hire consulting firms to produce research papers that claim that the poisoning didn’t happen, and/or question the existence of the poison, or claim that said concoction actually does good rather than harm. If that failed, we could then gum up the legal and political system with lobbyists and lawyers for decades.
In public discourse about our supposed post-truth society, most op-eds fixate on the way that social media can create separate reality bubbles. Few focus on what David Michaels, Obama’s Assistant Secretary of Labor for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), calls “mercenary science” — science-for-hire, contracted out by chemical and pharmaceutical companies to prove that their harmful products aren’t harmful by giving them the quantitative imprimatur of STEM knowledge. The idea that science and truth could diverge is profoundly troubling for our entire civilization.
While the vast majority of scientists, both employed publicly and privately, are honest and do their work as part of a larger quest for truth, there are a few notable exceptions. Specifically, a few mercenary science consulting firms have been very effective at helping corporations continue selling harmful chemicals and drugs long after they should have stopped.
Michaels, who has a new book on the topic titled “The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception,” has been studying this problem for years, in part by virtue of his 8-year tenure at OSHA. Now a public health professor at George Washington University, Michaels’ book pulls back the curtain on the way that dark money and for-profit science is quite literally killing Americans.
I spoke with Michaels over the phone about the problem of corporate science and his insider’s view; as usual, this interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Salon: To start, what is “mercenary science”? How do you define this?
David Michaels: Mercenary science means [when scientists] produce studies that aren’t designed to better understand the world, or they help make the world a better place — which is why most scientists are in the business of science – but to defend products and to defend corporations. And often to influence regulation or to slow the compensation of victims.
This is the Enron-ization of science. It’s created a fiction in order to promote an actual game, fiction around science. And it is quite mercenary. In fact, this phrase is not one that I invented, but actually is used by these consulting companies whose business model is to provide some using reports and testimonies to corporations, so they can continue to market dangerous products or activities without being hindered by regulation or by compensating the people they’ve hurt.
What would you say is the most shocking, real-life example of something like this — of mercenary science becoming embedded in mainstream discourse?
I think the most famous [example] is in the tobacco industry… who didn’t invent it, but who certainly gained the most from it — and in climate change. There’s actually some overlap between some of the same mercenary scientists in both examples.
But as I write [in my book], this is now become standard operating procedure for virtually every industry, and in many cases, it’s the same so-called scientists who are involved in doing it. Nowadays, the instinct of corporate leaders — CEOs and executives —when there’s an allegation that their product could be causing harm is to say, “How can we show that it isn’t causing harm?” Not, “how can we determine whether or not we cause harm,” and then figure out what to do about it.
Other examples [include] opioids, and essentially how a few pharmaceutical companies misrepresented the studies to make it look like these opioids were not addictive. We have a death toll of tens of thousands a year as a result of that.
So do you think the people who are actually doing this kind of mercenary science, do they —
How they sleep at night?
Yes — and, how do they find these people? My parents were scientists and I hung out around a lot of scientists, and in my experience pretty much all of them were driven by the quest for truth, not money.
I mean, go look back at the 1994 tobacco hearings with Henry Waxman. You had well-educated corporate executives put their right hands in the air, swear that they did not believe that nicotine was addictive. I opened [my book] with a quote from Upton Sinclair, “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it.”
It’s very clear that your financial relationship with products, with corporations influences how you think about them. The example I like to give, and this is Vioxx. You may remember Vioxx — it was a pain killer, a prescription drug invented by scientists at Merck to be used for arthritis and other sorts of pain, especially for people who couldn’t take aspirin. They, to test effectiveness they did a randomized clinical trial comparing it to Naprosyn, also known as Aleve. And they found it was effective, it was approved by the FDA, it went on the market, immediately became a very widely used, and successful and profitable drug.
Shortly after it came out, scientists independent of Merck looked at the results and found that the patients who were given Vioxx had more than twice the cardiovascular incident rate — including heart attacks — of the people who took comparable drugs like Naproxen (Aleve).
Instead of saying, “well, this is a significant problem,” scientists who were associated with Merck — and these were academic scientists at major academic medical centers — looked at these data, and they said, “No, Vioxx doesn’t increase risk of heart attack and stroke. It prevents it.”
And it’s true, you could look at it that way, but we don’t have a drug that prevents 60% percent of heart attacks — if we did, we’d put it in the water supply. We quickly learned the truth though, because at the same time, Merck started a randomized clinical trial to see if Vioxx prevented colon polyps, and we have no prevention for colon polyps — so [they did] a randomized, double-blind placebo trial, and that trial had to be stopped early because Vioxx was killing people. It more than doubled the risk of cardiovascular events.
In the few short years since Vioxx was on the market, FDA scientists estimated it cost somewhere between 88,000 and 120,000 heart attacks.
Here were very well-known cardiologists who were blinded for the truth by their financial relationship with Merck. And they were scientists who were not even in the business of product defense. So I think what happens is if your business model, if your financial relationships can influence how you look at science, it does.
What that tells me is we desperately need good science, and we desperately need accurate interpretation of scientific results, but they have to be done independently of the corporations that make these products or we won’t have honest results....
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https://thewalrus.ca/big-agro-on-campus/
no lnx
FEATURE / MAY 2017
Big Agro on Campus
Universities claim industry-funded research on chemical and pesticide safety is scientifically sound. Not everybody is convinced
BY BRUCE LIVESEY
ILLUSTRATION BY KATIE CAREY
Updated 16:21, Jul. 8, 2019 | Published 11:39, Apr. 11, 2017
IN EARLY 2014, New Brunswick’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) was facing a crisis. Rod Cumberland, former chief deer biologist for the province, had been waging a media and letter-writing campaign to draw attention to an unfolding disaster in the province’s forests—namely, the collapse of the white-tail deer population, which had dropped to 70,000 from a peak of 286,000 in 1985.
[Podcast
Cumberland was convinced that he had identified the culprit: glyphosate, the world’s most popular weed killer, which is sold primarily by Monsanto, an agrochemical multinational. Glyphosate is sprayed on 15,000 hectares of New Brunswick’s Crown land each year, and Cumberland believes the herbicide is wiping out the animal’s food source. “Each white-tail eats about a ton of food a year,” he explains, “so we were basically removing enough food to feed 32,000 of them annually.”
Cumberland’s charges placed the province in a bind. The government uses glyphosate to stunt the growth of hardwood trees—which the deer feed on—making it easier for the forest industry to grow softwood trees that can be turned into lumber. The chemical therefore sits at the very centre of one of the province’s most important industries. Internal emails from 2014 show senior provincial DNR bureaucrats scrambling to respond to Cumberland, at one point sharing damage-control suggestions from J. D. Irving Ltd., New Brunswick’s largest forestry company. Eventually, they hit upon a solution: find scientists who could defend glyphosate to the public.
Among the experts they enlisted was Len Ritter, a toxicologist from the University of Guelph well known for his claims that the dangers of pesticides and herbicides are misrepresented. Ritter was touted as one of three go-to scientists on a pro-glyphosate website sponsored by the New Brunswick government and forest companies. Last year, he and the others were sent to cities and towns across both New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, where they made presentations and answered questions from local residents about the provincial herbicide-spraying programs. At the public forums, the scientists argued that the decline in deer had been caused by harsh winters and coyotes. (Cumberland counters that deer populations in Maine and Quebec face the same climate challenges and predators, yet haven’t plunged as dramatically.)
By this time, Cumberland’s criticisms had helped spur a popular no-spraying movement, which was attracting thousands of petition signatures and setting up protests. His focus had shifted to glyphosate’s health and environmental impact. In March 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC)—an advisory arm of the World Health Organization (WHO)—concluded that the chemical is a “probable carcinogen.”
One month after the IARC issued its decision, Cumberland sent a list of studies to the New Brunswick government that detailed the herbicide’s dangers. In December 2015, he received a lengthy response from Ritter, who argued that the studies weren’t supported by reviews carried out by “major regulatory authorities,” and that glyphosate did not pose an unacceptable risk to human health. “I would advise that much of my attached commentary is not simply my personal opinion but rather is drawn from the recent [federal government] and EU reviews of the safety of glyphosate,” he wrote. Ritter copied the deputy minister of natural resources on the email, which was sent from his University of Guelph account.
A Fellow of the Academy of Toxicological Sciences, Ritter is one of Canada’s leading experts on the effects of pesticides and herbicides on humans, and was awarded a medal by the WHO in 2006, in recognition of his contributions as an advisor to the organization.
But Ritter also has a history of championing some of the industry’s most controversial agrochemical products. Critics such as Green Party leader Elizabeth May have accused him of having supported a dioxin-laced pesticide linked to Agent Orange while he was at Health Canada in the early 1980s—a pesticide whose sales, by 1979, had been suspended in the United States. In 1994, while on unpaid leave from his position as the director of what is now Health Canada’s Veterinary Drugs Directorate, Ritter testified during a parliamentary comittee hearing that bovine growth hormone, which boosts milk production, was “99.9 percent” safe (the government eventually decided against allowing its use in Canada). In 2015, the Prince Edward Island Potato Board flew him to Charlottetown to address fears that the pesticides being used by farmers were a cancer threat. Environmental activist Sharon Labchuk called him a “pesticide proponent” in a letter to PEI’s Journal Pioneer. “Ritter,” she claimed, “says pesticides are too difficult for the average Canadian to understand, that we should quit worrying and leave it up to the experts.”
Industry-funded scientists often demand an incredibly high standard of proof before they will accept something as toxic.
The fact that Ritter is a professor emeritus of environmental toxicology at the University of Guelph comes as no surprise to his detractors. Located in the city of Guelph, one hour west of Toronto, the university—nicknamed “Moo U”—is Canada’s top agricultural school and home to more than 20,000 students. Opened in 1874 on a farm provided by the province of Ontario, the university remains focused on supplying graduates for the agricultural, farming, forestry, and veterinary industries. This, inevitably, has meant that the school often teams up with the companies that dominate those sectors, forming partnerships that have paid dividends for the institution, which today claims to attract more research dollars per capita than any other comprehensive university in Canada. Indeed, as part of a push to make academic research more relevant in the marketplace, Ontario’s agriculture ministry—headquartered on campus—has ramped up its co-sponsorship of private sector–funded projects. Scientists are graded on the amount of outside investment they secure.
Academic critics warn that the arrangement is a Faustian bargain. Faculty members, they say, are being recruited by agrochemical giants to undermine criticisms levelled at their products, and therefore help keep potentially dangerous chemicals on the market.
ABOUT 3 BILLION kilograms of pesticides are sprayed across the globe annually; these chemicals constitute a $60 billion (US) market, and that number is expected to increase by one-third by 2019. In Canada, 100 million kilograms of pesticides were sold in 2014—up nearly 15 percent from five years earlier. Given the widespread use of these chemicals, it’s critical that agrochemical companies prove to regulatory agencies that their products are safe.
Every year, Monsanto, Bayer CropScience, BASF, and DuPont collectively spend hundreds of thousands of dollars at the University of Guelph on research projects largely designed to examine the environmental and health impacts of their compounds. The university has done its best to welcome this money. It has built a sprawling six-acre research park on its grounds that has housed offices for Monsanto, Syngenta, and dozens of other private-sector agricultural and farming corporations. Numerous companies—including Bayer—also sponsor research chairs.
These initiatives have resulted in one of the world’s largest concentrations of expertise and facilities dedicated to crop research and development—a Silicon Valley of agriculture responsible for breakthrough after breakthrough: edible nanomaterials that extend the colour and flavour of food; bioplastics derived from ingredients such as beans, soy, and wheat straw; DNA barcoding that helps distinguish more than 400,000 species of land plants. Jay Bradshaw, president of Syngenta Canada, may well have been speaking for the entire industry when, in a 2014 report that was prepared to drum up investment in the university, he was quoted as saying: “There is a phenomenal network of agrifood hubs of activity—of formal networks and informal networks—to be able to tap into. That’s a huge benefit for us.”
Part of that benefit, for Syngenta and others, appears to involve access to a number of Guelph researchers who are capable of effectively challenging claims that herbicides and pesticides are a threat to people, wildlife, and the environment. Ritter, for one, has long argued that pesticides generally pose no threat if applied properly, because they are present in such small concentrations in food and drinking water. “What government regulators do with any potentially toxic substance is control the exposure in order to control the risk,” he tells me over the phone. “The algorithm is based on a definition of ‘reasonable probability of no risk, no harm,’ even if exposure takes place every day for the rest of your life.”
One of the most widely used of those “potentially toxic substances” is glyphosate. Since its invention in the 1970s by Monsanto, nearly 8.6 billion kilograms of it have been applied around the world. An active ingredient in the company’s blockbuster product, Roundup, it also appears in weed-killer lines from Dow and Syngenta. By 2014, the global market for it was $5.5 billion (US).
While both the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) have declared the use of glyphosate to be safe, recent research has been setting off alarm bells. Two years before the IARC described the herbicide as a “probable carcinogen,” researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology claimed that it could cause obesity, dementia, autism, and Parkinson’s, among other chronic diseases.
But the controversy surrounding glyphosate has also become—thanks in no small part to the interventions of University of Guelph scientists—a case study in how difficult it is to establish any fixed opinion on the safety of such compounds. In 2001, with funding from the US National Science Foundation, Rick Relyea, a community ecologist then at the University of Pittsburgh, began a series of experiments looking into the effects of pesticides on amphibians. The sensitivity of that animal class to environmental changes makes it a useful indicator of ecosystem health. When Relyea introduced glyphosate to tadpoles, the results were dramatic. “The day after applying the pesticides,” he later wrote, “we found very high tadpole mortality in the tanks treated with Roundup.” In 2005, he published his findings in the journal Ecological Applications.
Soon afterwards, the journal published a lengthy letter from a group of scientists, including University of Guelph researchers Dean G. Thompson, then an adjunct professor there, and Keith Solomon. Now seventy-two, Solomon has published hundreds of papers, joined numerous international toxicology organizations and committees, and supervised dozens of graduate students. Both Solomon and Thompson have also conducted research funded by Monsanto.
The letter challenged Relyea’s findings, claiming, among other things, that the tadpoles had been exposed to a chemical concentration greater than typical application rates, and that his experiment had not tested real-world scenarios: because glyphosate is not sprayed directly over water, they argued, it poses a limited threat to aquatic life....
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ref
https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-secret-science-20190219-story.html
Scientist says some pollution is good for you — a disputed claim Trump’s EPA has embraced
By SUSANNE RUST
FEB 19, 2019 | 5:00 AM
Scientist says some pollution is good for you — a disputed claim Trump’s EPA has embraced
Water samples are taken for testing from a canal in the Cawelo Water District near Bakersfield in 2015. A researcher who has suggested that exposure to toxic chemicals can be good for humans is helping to shape Environmental Protection Agency policies. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)]
In early 2018, a deputy assistant administrator in the EPA, Clint Woods, reached out to a Massachusetts toxicologist best known for pushing a public health standard suggesting that low levels of toxic chemicals and radiation are good for people.
“I wanted to check to see if you might have some time in the next couple of days for a quick call to discuss a couple items …,” Woods wrote to Ed Calabrese.
Less than two weeks later, Calabrese’s suggestions on how the EPA should assess toxic chemicals and radiation were introduced, nearly word for word, in the U.S. government’s official journal, the Federal Register.
“This is a major big time victory,” Calabrese wrote in an email to Steve Milloy, a former coal and tobacco lobbyist who runs a website, junkscience.com, that seeks to discredit mainstream climate science.
“Yes. It is YUGE!” wrote Milloy, in response.
It was a glorious moment for Calabrese, who had been snubbed for decades by mainstream public health scientists because of his controversial research and theories.
Massachusetts toxicologist Ed Calabrese
Massachusetts toxicologist Ed Calabrese (University of Massachusetts)]
It also signified the major shift the EPA has taken under the Trump administration. More than any before it, this White House has actively sought out advice from industry lobbyists and the scientists they commission in setting pollution rules.
Denouncing the Obama-era EPA as an agency beholden to environmental extremists, the administration has not only dismissed mainstream science but embraced widely discredited alternatives that critics say are not consistent with the agency’s focus on improving public and environmental health.
Calabrese’s role illustrates a different side of this shift: the potential removal of longstanding public health practices and the incorporation of industry-backed and disputed science into federal environmental policy.
Calabrese spent decades advancing his ideas, facing skepticism and criticism from peers in the toxicology community while winning funding from companies whose bottom lines conformed with his views.
He says most of the pushback he receives comes from left-of-center toxicologists who see him as “the devil incarnate” for accepting industry funding and challenging their ideology. He maintains his science is solid and will be vindicated in time.
“These environmental regulatory people are very closed-minded,” he said. They won’t reconsider their standards, [note trumpian pop psych] and see that some of the agents they call harmful “actually can induce adaptive responses,” Calabrese said.
This view — that pollution and radiation can be beneficial — has many experts worried. The fact that such a position may become EPA policy, they say, portends a future in which corporate desires outweigh public and environmental health.
“Industry has been pushing for this for a long time,” said David Michaels, former assistant secretary of labor for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration who’s a professor of environmental and occupational health at George Washington University. “Not just the chemical industry, but the radiation and tobacco industries too.”
If the EPA ultimately adopts Calabrese’s proposed new regulations, researchers say it could change decades of standards and guidelines on clean air, water and toxic waste. It could also fundamentally alter the way the government assesses new chemicals and pesticides entering the marketplace.
“This is industry’s holy grail,” said Michaels.
If the EPA ultimately adopts Ed Calabrese’s proposed new regulations, researchers say it could change decades of standards and guidelines on clean air, water and toxic waste, such as those that apply to PBF Energy's Torrance Refining Co.
If the EPA ultimately adopts Ed Calabrese’s proposed new regulations, researchers say it could change decades of standards and guidelines on clean air, water and toxic waste, such as those that apply to PBF Energy's Torrance Refining Co. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)]
Can pollution be healthy?
For decades, federal agencies charged with investigating and regulating carcinogens, toxic chemicals and radiation have been guided by the assumption that if a substance is dangerous at some level, it is harmful at any level. The higher the exposure, the more harm done. The lower the dose, the less. And the risk doesn’t entirely disappear until the substance is removed.
This is known as the linear no-threshold model, and industry dislikes it because it generally assumes that there is no level, or threshold, of exposure that can be considered totally safe.
But research done on low exposures to toxins has been less than definitive. Experiments designed to test carcinogens and radiation at low levels often produce conflicting results — with, for example, some studies of a chemical showing harm, other studies showing no effect, and a few suggesting a net benefit. In other cases, there is no information at all to guide regulators.
In the face of such uncertainty, the EPA and other agencies have taken a cautious approach by relying on the linear no-threshold model. Where data are absent or uncertain, they assume some level of risk.
It is an imperfect but protective approach, say many public health specialists. They argue that in a human population that varies widely in age, health and levels of chemical exposures, it is imperative that the agency cast a wide, conservative and protective net.
For decades, national and international scientific bodies have upheld this approach. It has been reviewed and re-reviewed dozens of times, including most recently by the congressionally chartered National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and the EPA.
At the same time, industry has funded scientists to conduct and promote research designed to poke holes in the linear no-threshold model.
And that is where Calabrese comes in. He has long argued that regulators “erred on the side of being protective” at the cost of billions of dollars per year to industry.
Calabrese is a proselytizer of hormesis, the idea that dangerous chemicals and radiation are beneficial at low doses. He says they have a stimulating effect.
Polluting industries have promoted hormesis as an alternative to linear no-threshold for decades, but they had gotten little traction until the EPA embraced it last April.
“It’s clearly not mainstream,” said Thomas Burke, professor and director of the Risk Sciences Institute at Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Burke and other experts say there are clearly scenarios where toxic chemicals can have beneficial effects in clinical and pharmacological settings, such as in the case of tamoxifen, which at low doses is effective at preventing and treating breast cancer but at higher doses can lead to blood clots, stroke and uterine cancer.
But, they say, what happens in a clinical setting can’t and shouldn’t be immediately applied to a regulatory, public health setting.
In the clinical case, “you have a doctor controlling and administering the medication to an individual,” said David Jacobs, a professor of public health at the University of Minnesota, who has published studies showing hormetic effects in some industrial pollutants. “The doctor can pull the medication at any time.”
“There is no way to control the dose a person gets from an industrial or agricultural chemical,” he said. “It’s not being doled out in pills and monitored by a physician who can lower it if the patient isn’t responding well.”
Therefore, Jacobs said, it would be dangerous to use hormesis as a framework for protecting public and environmental health.
“It really doesn’t pass the sniff test” when applying it to public health, Burke said, while allowing for its place in the forum of ideas. “I always teach my classes that there are other theories. It’s like any part of science, there are different points of view. Whether it’s about climate change or low doses.”
But he also teaches that one needs to know who has skin in the game. And in the case of hormesis, he said, that’s industry.
EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C.
EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C. (Associated Press)]
Big Tobacco embraces disputed research
In the early 1980s, Calabrese was a tenured professor at the University of Massachusetts, stringing together public agency and industry-funded grants to study chemicals in drinking water and the effects of ozone on mice.
His funders included the EPA, the state of Massachusetts, the Hoffman-LaRoche pharmaceutical company and semiconductor giant Digital Corp.
Then in 1985, he reached out to the Council for Tobacco Research, the research arm of the tobacco industry, seeking a grant to examine “a possible inherited and metabolic susceptibility to lung cancer in smokers.” His proposal was declined.
Sheldon Sommers, a physician at New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital and scientific director of the council, wrote in response to the grant application that Calabrese’s proposal “...is a mad hatter’s tea party sort of epidemiologic approach, and a total $2.1 million plus would likely be frittered away in my opinion,” according to documents from the UC San Francisco Truth Tobacco Industry Documents archive.
But by the 1990s, Calabrese had solidly established himself as a trusted scientist with the tobacco industry. He found they were interested in research that questioned the methods that regulatory agencies use to assess risk.
In a 1994 proposal to R.J. Reynolds, Calabrese offered to investigate a new kind of smokeless cigarette for the company, but also incorporate into his research “the loss of current benefits associated with smoking, such as protection from certain types of cancers and other illnesses…”
It was when he began his work on hormesis that Calabrese got attention from a broader range of industries.
With seed money from R.J. Reynolds, Dow Chemical, Procter & Gamble and others, as well as the EPA, Calabrese established a hormesis working group at the University of Massachusetts, which he called the Biological Effects of Low Level Exposures, or BELLE. Minutes from a 1990 advisory board meeting show the group chose not to use the word “hormesis” in its official name.
According to documents, Calabrese and his funders also held off on pushing a hormesis regulatory agenda until they’d built a sizable base of published scientific research.
Between 1990 and 2013, Calabrese received more than $8 million from companies and institutions, including R.J. Reynolds, Exxon Mobil, Dow Chemical, General Electric, the Department of Energy and the U.S. Air Force, to conduct research on hormesis.
Spokesmen from Exxon Mobil and the Air Force say they no longer fund Calabrese’s work.
Calabrese established his own scientific society, the International Dose Response Society, and his own hormesis journal — now called Dose Response — where he served as editor-in-chief.
He wrote hundreds of articles, in his own journal and in others (including “Should hormesis be the default model in risk assessment?” and “The importance of hormesis to public health”), organized dozens of conferences and delivered scores of talks.
And while his publication portfolio is vast, it is also broad. It includes not just studies of hormesis, but research on soil ingestion, opinion pieces on law and regulatory policy, historical treatise on science, and a few scathing, posthumous rebukes of revered scientists, such as Herman Muller, a Nobel prize-winner and supporter of linear no-threshold.
Calabrese insists his funding does not influence his work.
“My job involves finding financial support to do studies in my field,” said Calabrese. “I seek support from the private and public sectors. The University independently evaluates each of these for compliance with the rules.”
Not all of his money comes from industry or government agencies with extensive toxic waste sites. Between 2000 and 2013, Calabrese received $50,000 from the EPA to hold a conference on soil ingestion, and $50,000 from CalEPA for a reference database he built on cancer publications. He also received a $750,000 joint grant from the EPA and the American Chemistry Council, the chemical industry’s trade group, to study soil ingestion by construction workers.
Yet, despite his prolific career, he has instigated criticism and rebuke from many of his peers for his push on public and environmental health policy. He has been described as a “prominent industry consultant,” having “outlying views,” whose science is “way out there.”
For years he failed to get regulatory agencies to take him seriously.
Then Donald Trump was elected president.
President Trump and former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt
President Trump and former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt (Associated Press)]
‘We are winning’
On Sept. 5, 2017, nearly nine months after Trump was sworn in as president and seven months after Scott Pruitt was confirmed as head of the EPA, Calabrese wrote an email to Milloy, the former coal lobbyist who is a Fox news commentator. The Los Angeles Times obtained the emails through a public records request to the University of Massachusetts.
“I wanted to connect with you on whether and how it may be possible to get the EPA to consider changing the LNT [linear no-threshold model] to something far better,” Calabrese wrote.
Milloy had served on Trump’s EPA transition team and was still in touch with high-ranking officials in Pruitt’s agency.
A few months later, Calabrese wrote to Milloy again, letting him know that he’d corresponded with Ryan Jackson, Pruitt’s chief of staff, and sensed interest in a move against linear no-threshold.
Not long after Woods, the EPA’s deputy assistant of the Office of Air and Radiation, emailed Calabrese asking if he wanted to talk about “default linear assumptions” and other items.
The two arranged a call, and on April 19, 2018, Woods sent Calabrese draft language for a small section in the EPA’s proposed new ruling on transparency, called “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science.”
“It is good what you have but you need a little more,” wrote Calabrese, who then suggested a line, which he altered twice, in email exchanges with Woods, before settling on this: “EPA shall also incorporate the concept of model uncertainty when needed as a default to optimize low dose risk estimation based on the major competing models (LNT, Threshold, and Hormesis).”
In other words, if the EPA is uncertain about a particular chemical’s impacts at low doses, it would abandon linear no-threshold as a default, and try other models instead, including hormesis.
On April 25, Milloy sent Calabrese the final wording for the draft proposal, which included Calabrese’s line nearly word for word.
“I am almost passing out with surprise and euphoria… ” Calabrese wrote Milloy after seeing the document.
The rule was posted for comment in the Federal Register on April 30, although a final ruling has not been announced.
John Konkus, an EPA spokesman, said the input and perspective from “the Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Dose Response” was welcomed, and reflected the perspective of “a wide variety of scientific experts” the agency reached out to when drafting the proposal.
Public health specialists outside the agency say that if the final language is adopted, it is likely to tie the EPA up in knots as it tries and then debates all the alternative models. It could also have profound effects on current and future standards for drinking water, air and toxic waste sites.
“EPA tries to be conservative in its setting of risks,” said Jan Beyea, a retired radiation physicist who has worked with the National Academies of Science. “Calabrese and collaborators think that most pollutants are good for you at low doses, so no need to be conservative.”
EPA spokeswoman Molly Block declined to speculate on whether the rule would be passed and how it would affect environmental rules that were set based on the linear no-threshold model.
Industry groups have praised the proposed change.
“We support moving away from over-reliance on the linear no -threshold default,” wrote a spokesman for the American Chemistry Council, the trade group for the chemical industry. It’s a method, he says that “frequently results in inflated health risk estimates and unwarranted, costly risk management decisions.”
Milloy also seemed pleased with the proposed ruling.
“The EPA should be open and transparent about how and what they are basing their decisions on,” he said, “and they should be using the best science available.”
In any case, he said, “we’re winning.”
Susanne Rust
CONTACT
Susanne Rust is an investigative reporter specializing in environmental issues. Before coming to the Los Angeles Times, she was the editor of Columbia University’s Energy & Environmental Reporting Project, where she oversaw several reporting projects, including a series that examined ExxonMobil’s understanding of climate science in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s. Rust started her career in 2003 as a science reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She is the recipient of numerous journalism awards, and was a John S. Knight fellow at Stanford University in 2009, and the Center for Investigative Reporting’s environment reporter between 2010 and 2014.
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Last year we released a frackademia report that uncovered the fossil fuel industry ties and conflicts of interest surrounding a University of Minnesota Duluth study on the Line 3 pipeline.
It turns out our report pressured a UMD professor who was tied to the industry-backed study to resign his board seat from the business group that commissioned it. He told Minnesota Native News that he didn’t want his department “to be involved in any organization that advocates for specific projects.”
Our report was covered in City Pages, the Twin Cities’ alternative weekly
This is our latest (though not our first) strike against frackademia - exposing the role it plays in packaging fossil fuel industry-backed “research” under the guise of neutral expertise.
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https://www.ecowatch.com/umd-study-line-3-2509432069.html
Pipeline Study, or PR Puffery for Enbridge?
By Public Accountability Initiative
An economic impact study of Enbridge's proposed Line 3 replacement pipeline released by the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD) was financed by an Enbridge-backed business group to which UMD has multiple close ties, all which the study failed to disclose, according to a new report.
The report from the nonprofit watchdog group Public Accountability Initiative (PAI) documents the major undisclosed conflicts of interest surrounding the UMD study, including that the group that requested the study and paid UMD for it, the Area Partnership for Economic Expansion (APEX), is closely tied to and funded by Enbridge, and that, along with Enbridge, UMD is a dues-paying members of APEX, giving it $30,000 a year.
UMD Chancellor Lendley Black also sits on the board of APEX alongside fellow board member Lorraine Little, Enbridge's U.S. director of public affairs, and UMD Natural Resources Research Institute Director Rolf Weberg sits on APEX's Executive Committee, all facts which UMD failed to disclose in its study.
The results of the study that the Enbridge-backed APEX paid UMD to produce have been pushed by APEX and other Line 3 boosters in the media and in public hearings. Other fossil fuel corporations that have publicly supported the pipeline, such as Allete's Minnesota Power, also have close ties to UMD and APEX, the report shows.
"The conflicts of interest surrounding this study are huge," said Derek Seidman, a research analyst at PAI and author of the report. "Public universities exist for the purpose of public education and the public good, not as promotional vehicles for industry-backed research. People making up their minds about Line 3 deserve to have their public institutions support more responsible and transparent studies that aren't so closely linked to the very entities aiming to profit off of the pipeline."
The report highlights other major conflicts of interests surrounding the UMD study, including that the Duluth News Tribune, the Twin Ports region's main newspaper which has published favorable editorials and op-eds on Enbridge's Line 3 proposal that cite the results of the UMD study, is a paying member of APEX alongside both Enbridge and UMD. Duluth News Tribune publisher Neal Ronquist sits on the APEX board alongside Enbridge and UMD.
The Duluth News Tribune has failed to disclose these major conflicts of interest in its coverage of Line 3 and the UMD study, especially the facts that the Tribune is a member of and funds the very group—on whose board it sits, alongside Enbridge and UMD—that commissioned the UMD study.
"These are stark professional and ethical failings on the part of the Duluth News Tribune and its reporting on Line 3 and the UMD study," said Seidman. "People making up their minds about Line 3 deserve to know if their leading media sources, which ideally they should trust, have major conflicts of interest around coverage of the topic."
The report also analyzes the UMD study's methodological flaws, including its use of IMPLAN, a modeling program that can be easily manipulated to arrive at varied results, and its reliance on inputs provided by Enbridge—the very company behind the Line 3 pipeline—to generate the study's findings. The study also doesn't take into account the likely costs associated with environmental damage, declining property values, and emissions that the pipeline will surely create.
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https://www.propublica.org/article/these-professors-make-more-than-thousand-bucks-hour-peddling-mega-mergers
If THE GOVERNMENT ENDS UP approving the $85 billion AT&T-Time Warner merger,
credit won’t necessarily belong to the executives, bankers, lawyers, and lobbyists pushing for the deal. More likely, it will be due to the professors.
A serial acquirer, AT&T must persuade the government to allow every major deal. Again and again, the company has relied on economists from America’s top universities to make its case before the Justice Department or the Federal Trade Commission. Moonlighting for a consulting firm named Compass Lexecon, they represented AT&T when it bought Centennial, DirecTV, and Leap Wireless; and when it tried unsuccessfully to absorb T-Mobile. And now AT&T and Time Warner have hired three top Compass Lexecon economists to counter criticism that the giant deal would harm consumers and concentrate too much media power in one company.
Today, “in front of the government, in many cases the most important advocate is the economist and lawyers come second,” said James Denvir, an antitrust lawyer at Boies, Schiller.
Economists who specialize in antitrust — affiliated with Chicago, Harvard, Princeton, the University of California, Berkeley, and other prestigious universities — reshaped their field through scholarly work showing that mergers create efficiencies of scale that benefit consumers.But they reap their most lucrative paydays by lending their academic authority to mergers their corporate clients propose.Corporate lawyers hire them from Compass Lexecon and half a dozen other firms to sway the government by documenting that a merger won’t be “anti-competitive”: in other words, that it won’t raise retail prices, stifle innovation, or restrict product offerings. Their optimistic forecasts, though, often turn out to be wrong, and the mergers they champion may be hurting the economy.
American industry is more highly concentrated than at any time since the gilded age. Need a pharmacy? Americans have two main choices. A plane ticket? Four major airlines. They have four choices to buy cell phone service. Soon one company will sell more than a quarter of the quaffs of beer around the world.Some of the professors earn more than top partners at major law firms. Dennis Carlton, a self-effacing economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and one of Compass Lexecon’s experts on the AT&T-Time Warner merger, charges at least $1,350 an hour. In his career, he has made about $100 million, including equity stakes and non-compete payments, ProPublica estimates. Carlton has written reports or testified in favor of dozens of mergers, including those between AT&T-SBC Communications and Comcast-Time Warner, and three airline deals: United-Continental, Southwest-Airtran, and American-US Airways.
Mergers peaked last year at $2 trillion in the U.S. The top 50 companies in a majority of American industries gained share between 1997 and 2012, and “competition may be decreasing in many economic sectors,” President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers warned in April.
While the impact of this wave of mergers is much debated, prominent economists such as Lawrence Summers and Joseph Stiglitz suggest that it is one important reason why, even as corporate profits hit records, economic growth is slow, wages are stagnant, business formation is halting, and productivity is lagging. “Only the monopoly-power story can convincingly account” for high business profits and low corporate investment, Summers wrote earlier this year.
In addition, politicians such as U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren have criticized big mergers for giving a handful of companies too much clout. President-elect Trump said in October that his administration would not approve the AT&T-Time Warner merger “because it’s too much concentration of power in the hands of too few.”
During the campaign, Trump didn’t signal what his broader approach to mergers would be. But the early signs are that his administration will weaken antitrust enforcement and strengthen the hand of economists. He selected Joshua Wright, an economist and professor at George Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School, to lead his transition on antitrust matters. Wright, himself a former consultant for Boston-based Charles River Associates, regularly celebrates mergers in speeches and articles and has supported increasing the influence of economists in assessing monopoly power. “Mergers between competitors do not often lead to market power but do often generate significant benefits for consumers,” he wrote in The New York Times this week.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/20/business/fact-check-paraquat-weed-killer-parkinsons.html
no link
LONDON — Syngenta, the Swiss pesticide giant, claims on its website that data from an influential 2011 study shows that farmers who use the weed killer paraquat are less likely to develop Parkinson’s disease than the general population.
However, Syngenta’s claim is at odds with the actual findings of the study, according to two of its authors.
The 2011 study, carried out by the National Institutes of Health and researchers from other institutions around the world, found that people who used paraquat or another pesticide, called rotenone, were roughly two and a half times more likely to develop Parkinson’s.
The work is known as the Farming and Movement Evaluation, or FAME, study. It drew on a sweeping United States government project called the Agricultural Heath Study, which tracked more than 80,000 farmers and their spouses, as well as other people who applied pesticides, in Iowa and North Carolina.
UNCERTAIN HARVEST
This Pesticide Is Prohibited in Britain. Why Is It Still Being Exported? DEC. 20, 2016
U.S. Regulator Signs Off on ChemChina-Syngenta Deal AUG. 22, 2016
Monsanto, in Bid for Syngenta, Reaches for a Business It Left Behind MAY 8, 2015
The FAME researchers identified 115 people from the Agricultural Health Study who developed Parkinson’s, and studied 110 of them who provided information on the pesticides they used.
The study was influential even among some people who had been skeptics of a connection between the chemicals and the disease. Gary W. Miller, a professor of environmental health at Emory University, referred to a link between Parkinson’s and paraquat as a “red herring” in a 2007 publication. But while Dr. Miller said in a recent email exchange that he had concerns about some previous research making the connection, “the FAME data are strong and should be considered.” He said the study “appears to show a connection between paraquat exposure and Parkinson’s disease.”
Because of the prominence of the FAME study, Syngenta addresses it on one of its websites, paraquat.com. Syngenta claims that the study shows that only 115 people had Parkinson’s out of the more than 80,000 people in the broader Agricultural Health Study. Therefore, “the incidence of Parkinson’s disease” in the study “appears to be lower than in the general U.S. population,” Syngenta says.
...
==
capt 616 916
pension plan: Graham, Dudley, Bolten,
Hacks are sellout scientists, flacks are freelance PR spinmeisters
---
syngenta
By DANNY HAKIMDEC. 31, 2016
EXETER, England — The bee findings were not what Syngenta expected to hear.
The pesticide giant had commissioned James Cresswell, an expert in flowers and bees at the University of Exeter in England, to study why many of the world’s bee colonies were dying. Companies like Syngenta have long blamed a tiny bug called a varroa mite, rather than their own pesticides, for the bee decline.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/31/business/scientists-loved-and-loathed-by-syngenta-an-agrochemical-giant.html
==
There’s nothing new or unusual about corporate and academic collaboration [3]. IBM, for instance [4], has partnered with universities around the country since the 1940s to support computer science education. This relationship is mutually beneficial both for the tech giant and the institutions sponsored. IBM’s grant dollars provide welcome funding for research and equipment for students, all while fostering a new class of computer scientists and engineers.
University-business partnerships, however, require a careful balance. Take the tobacco industry. According to a 2012 study [5] by Harvard professor Allan Brandt, cigarette makers all but invented the concept of industry-academic conflicts of interest. Since the 1950s, cigarette companies have sought to influence the debate about the dangers of smoking to sell more of their products. One tactic used was aligning with university-based science and underwriting millions of dollars [6] for favorable research.
A number of industries have evidently taken a page from the tobacco playbook. Powerful industries from Big Oil to Big Food have been found funneling eye-popping sums of money to university professors in order to fund research and promote their commercial interests. The corporate hijacking [7] of higher education is more complex than it looks. When state universities or land grant colleges see their budgets stretched thin, some faculty may feel pressured to seek or accept much-needed funding in ways that are not transparent to the public.
Nonetheless, academics are counted upon for the integrity of their assertions. Industry funding has been shown [8] to undermine objectivity, and professors violate their responsibilities as impartial experts as well as the public’s trust when they associate with unscrupulous commercial interests.
Here are 13 prominent university professors who appear to have stepped over the line between big business and academia.
1 & 2. Carol O’Neil & Theresa Nicklas.Back in 2011, a number of media outlets breathlessly touted [9] a surprising new study [10] that found children who eat candy weigh less than children who do not. The study’s authors included professors O'Neil of Louisiana State University and Nicklas of Baylor College of Medicine and Victor Fulgoni, a former Kellogg executive and consultant.
Unsurprisingly, an Associated Press investigation [11] by Candice Choi revealed that paper was not only partially sponsored by the National Confectioners Association—which counts such candy giants as Hershey, Wrigley, Mars and Nestle as group members—but that the trade group also made a number of suggestions to the paper. "You'll note I took most but not (all) their comments," Fulgoni wrote in an email to O'Neil in 2010. A similar study on candy and adults also received comments from the candy group.
O'Neil told the AP she did not receive compensation for the work, but in 2011, Nicklas sent Nutrition Impact, Fulgoni’s consulting business, an invoice for $11,500 for three manuscripts, including $2,500 for "candy." The professors also co-authored a paper about the health benefits of chickpeas and hummus funded by Sabra Dipping Co. Even though a disclosure said that Sabra did not provide input, the final paper did include the company’s suggestions, the AP reported.
3. Wei-Hock Soon.The aerospace engineer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics is a noted climate change skeptic [12], who asserts that global warming is caused by the sun, not human activity. Freedom of Information Act documents obtained by Greenpeace [13] showed that Soon accepted more than $1 million over the last decade from fossil fuel titans such as Exxon Mobil, the American Petroleum Institute, the Koch brothers and more.
The New York Times [14] reported that Soon failed to disclose that conflict of interest in his scientific papers at least 11 times [15]. This is also telling: His work is often cited by prominent climate-denying politicians, includingsnowball-wielding [16] Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), the chairman of the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works who considers Soon one of his personal heroes [17].
Soon still [18] passionately defends his work and presented his research at a Paris Climate Conference “counter-conference” alongside Heartland Institute, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Watch the video below:
4. William Happer.In December, a bombshell [19] Greenpeace sting suggested that two academics from prominent universities could be bought by fossil fuel companies. The first was Happer, a Princeton University professor and prominent climate change skeptic [20]. The physicist, who is not a climatologist, was approached by Greenpeace activists posing as consultants of a Beirut-based energy company to author a paper on “the benefits of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels.”
Emails show [21] that Happer wanted $250 an hour for his work and asked that his fee be paid to the climate-doubting group CO2 Coalition, where he’s a board member. Happer also disclosed in the emails that Peabody Energy donated $8,000 to the CO2 Coalition for testimony in a Minnesota hearing on the impacts of carbon dioxide.
The Greenpeace investigation was released hours before Happer testified at Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Tex.) bizarre Senate hearing [22] disputing climate change. Right before his testimony, when a Greenpeace researcher confronted Happer about how much money he received from Peabody, Happer barked, “You son of a bitch, I haven’t taken a dime!”
Happer has not disputed [23] the veracity of the emails but refused to comment about the operation.
Watch here:
. Frank Clemente.The professor emeritus of sociology at Penn State University was the second professor implicated by the Greenpeace operation. This time, Greenpeace activists posed as Indonesian coal mining representatives and approached Clemente to write a report before the Paris Climate talks “to counter damaging research on linking coal to premature deaths,” according to published emails [28]. Clemente, who has previously argued against [29] coal divestment among educational institutions, agreed and requested $15,000 for an 8- to 10-page report and emphasized he would not have to disclose his sponsor.
“There is no requirement to declare source funding in the US,” Clemente wrote in an email. “My research and writing has been supported by government agencies, trade associations, the university and private companies and all has been published under the rubric of me as an independent scholar—which I am.”
In response, Clemente told [30] the Australian Broadcasting Corporation he was an independent consultant and not on the Penn State payroll during the sting. “I fully stand behind every single statement I made,” he said.
6. Bruce Chassy.Like Soon, the University of Illinois professor emeritus has similarly come under fire for his close ties to the controversial agrichemical industry. U.S. Right to Know, a nonprofit watchdog group, obtained a jaw-dropping cache of emails through FOIA requests unveiling how Monsanto and its allies not only donated money to professors but also enlisted them to do PR, lobbying and regulatory work for the agrichemical industry.
On September 2015, a stunning exposé from the New York Times [31] on the FOIA emails described how Chassy received money from Monsanto and collaborated with [32] the agrichemical industry’s lobbying of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to reject a proposal that would tighten the regulations on pesticide-resistant seeds.
Monsanto’s Eric Sachs, who leads the company’s scientific outreach, emailed [33] Chassy to set up Academics Review [34], a nonprofit aimed at countering critics of GMOs. “The key” to Academics Review’s success will be “keeping Monsanto in the background so as not to harm the credibility of the information,” Sachs wrote.
This past March, a WBEZ [35] investigation by Monica Eng uncovered that Monsanto gave Chassy more than $57,000 in two years to help promote, defend and deregulate GMOs through the lobbying of federal officials. Monsanto also made $140,000 in “biotech research and outreach” payments through the University of Illinois Foundation between 2006 and June 2012.
Chassy has harshly criticized [36] the U.S. Right to Know campaign.
7. Kevin Folta.The professor and chairman of the horticultural sciences department at the University of Florida has been labeled a “Monsanto shill” by critics after the FOIA emails indicated frequent collaboration with the world’s largest seed company. The plant scientist was the center of the 2015 New York Times exposé [31] by Eric Lipton, who writes:
Dr. Folta, the emails show, soon became part of an inner circle of industry consultants, lobbyists and executives who devised strategy on how to block state efforts to mandate G.M.O. labeling and, most recently, on how to get Congress to pass legislation that would pre-empt any state from taking such a step.
“I’m glad to sign on to whatever you like, or write whatever you like,” Folta wrote [37] in an October 2014 email to a Monsanto executive.
Folta, a Buzzfeed [38] profile noted, corresponded with global public relations firm Ketchum, which represents the powerful Council for Biotechnology Information, to write an Orlando Sentinel op-ed [39], in which he claims "profiting authors, celebrity chefs and eco-terrorists" are attempting "to arrest the pace of scientific progress" in regard to GMOs. (Ketchum has a notorious reputation: Stacy Malkan, the co-director of U.S. Right to Know,notes [40] that the firm "remains a key player in PR efforts to dampen demand for organic foods, spinning messages that tell consumers organics are over-priced and over-hyped... [and] runs the GMO Answers website, funded by Monsanto, Dow, DuPont, Syngenta, Bayer and BASF.")
In August 2014, Monsanto gave Folta an unrestricted $25,000 grant through the university’s agricultural biotechnology communication program. The university tried returning the money to Monsanto, but the company refused. Folta, citing personal threats, later decided to donate the money [41] to a campus food bank. Folta wrote in a recent blog post [42] that he is neither pro- nor anti-GMO but has an “overwhelmingly positive” opinion of the technology.
8. David Shaw.According to the New York Times piece, Monsanto provided at least $880,000 in grants to Mississippi State University’s vice president for research and economic development.
The FOIA emails show [43] that Shaw was approached by both Monsanto and Dow Chemical to submit comments to the USDA to approve the former’s Roundup Ready 2 Xtend GMO soybeans and the latter’s Enlist weedkiller. Dow executive Larry Walton sent a June 2015 email [44] to Shaw requesting his support for Enlist. In the message, Walton noted that the Mississippi Agricultural Industry Council, where Walton is president, has provided scholarship funds to Mississippi State students. Shaw agreed to the two requests.
Shaw, Folta and seven other professors were also included in an August 2013 group email [45] from Sachs, the Monsanto outreach executive. Sachs asks the group to lend their academic gravitas on a series of articles touting the benefits of GMOs aimed at the general public. The Monsanto exec even assigned them topics and provided talking points and added that company-hired PR firms would plug the finished articles.
“The key to success is participation by all of you—recognized leaders with the knowledge, reputation and communication experience needed to communicate authoritatively with the target groups,” the email stated.
Shaw and Cornell entomologist and professor Anthony Shelton were tasked with the topic, “sustainable crop systems” and the professors complied. The final co-authored article, “Green Genes: Sustainability Advantages of Herbicide Tolerant and Insect Resistant Crops,” was published [46] by the Genetic Literacy Project, an organization critics [47] have labeled an agrichemical industry front group.
9. Calestous Juma.The Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government professor was also part of the Sachs group email. Juma, who is enthusiastically pro-GMO [48], wrote a December 2014 piece [49] titled, “Global Risks of Rejecting Agricultural Biotechnology,” a topic—and a similar headline—Sachs suggested. The piece was also published by the Genetic Literacy Project.
Citing the FOIA emails, the Boston Globe [50] described how Monsanto connected Juma with a marketing company to promote his paper “as part of Monsanto’s strategy to win over the public and lawmakers.” The international development specialist defended his piece, telling the Boston Globe he was not paid by Monsanto and merely pulled material from his previously published book on the topic.
“It’s not that I was trying to hide anything,” Juma said.
10. James O. Hill.The University of Colorado professor of pediatrics and medicine was the former [51] president of the Global Energy Balance Network, a nonprofit that promoted itself as a obesity research nonprofit. Exposés from the Associated Press [52] and the New York Times [53] in 2015, however, revealed that Coca-Cola was funding research that claims lack of exercise, not sugary soda, is to blame for the global obesity epidemic. According to the Associated Press, since 2010, the beverage giant gave $1 million to the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and since 2010, $550,000 to Hill.
While the group denied its research was influenced by Coke, Hill wrote in an email to a top Coke executive, "I want to help your company avoid the image of being a problem in people's' lives and back to being a company that brings important and fun things to them.” The network disbanded in late 2015, citing [54] “resource limitations.”
11. Steven N. Blair.As the New York Times described in its 2015 report, the University of South Carolina public health professor—“whose research over the past 25 years has formed much of the basis of federal guidelines on physical activity”—was the vice president of the Global Energy Balance Network. The University of South Carolina also received, and kept $500,000 from Coke.
In a video launching the Global Energy Balance Network, Blair said, “Most of the focus in the popular media and in the scientific press is, ‘Oh they’re eating too much, eating too much, eating too much’—blaming fast food, blaming sugary drinks and so on. And there’s really virtually no compelling evidence that that, in fact, is the cause.”
But as AlterNet's Reynard Loki reported [55], the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans [56], a joint report of the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services found that "sugary beverages are extremely popular, with soda, energy drinks and sports drinks making up the fourth highest source of calories among Americans overall—and the third highest source for children and adolescents up to the age of 18."
vid
12. Gregory A. Hand.The former founding dean and professor of epidemiology at West Virginia University School of Public Health also helped found the Global Energy Balance Network. Hand, along with professors Hill and Blair, announcing the group’s formation in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. According to the New York Times, Coca-Cola gave Hand $806,500 in 2011 for a study and another $507,000 in 2014 to establish the group. Hand’s CV [57] from August 2015 boasts funding from the Coca-Cola Company.
Hand’s colleague, Walter Willett, chair of the Nutrition Department at the Harvard School of Public Health likened the actions of the Global Energy Balance Network to the tobacco industry’s campaign to downplay the health risks of smoking. “You can always buy somebody, it seems,” Willett told the Charleston Gazette-Mail [58]. “And it’s really unfortunate that some members of our academic community essentially go on the payroll of Coca-Cola, either directly or indirectly.”
News emerged this month that Hand has been forced out as dean. He has been demoted to a role “in developing partnerships that enhance the mission and work of health sciences at WVU,” the school is quoted as saying, according to Corporate Crime Reporter [59].
13. Peter Phillips.The University of Saskatchewan public policy professor was also asked by Monsanto's Eric Sachs to throw his weight behind a pro-GMO piece.
The finished piece, “Economic Consequences of Regulations of GM Crops,” closely mirrored the subject matter of “burdensome” regulations that stifle biotechnology, something that Sachs had pitched. The paper was again published [60] on the Genetic Literacy Project website in December and did not disclose Monsanto’s meddling.
According to the Saskatoon StarPhoenix [61], “Phillips said there was no need to declare his connections because he was not paid and Monsanto did not ask him to alter his research.”
However, Gary Ruskin, co-director for U.S Right to Know which accessed the emails, disagrees.
“Monsanto says jump and these scientists said, how high? This is not how publicly funded scientists should behave,” Ruskin told the publication, adding that Americans should trust top university scientists to disclose any conflict of interest.
Lorraine Chow is a freelance writer and reporter based in South Carolina.
---
Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/investigations/13-academics-who-have-become-shills-corporate-giants-food-agrochemical-and-fossil
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/lorraine-chow
[2] http://alternet.org
[3] http://stateofinnovation.thomsonreuters.com/corporate-academic-collaborations-promote-funding-and-influence
[4] http://www.skilledup.com/insights/getting-real-in-the-real-world-latest-in-university-business-partnerships
[5] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3490543/
[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/26/health/research/26lung.html?_r=0
[7] http://www.alternet.org/story/155375/how_corporations_like_monsanto_have_hijacked_higher_education
[8] http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0040005
[9] http://www.livescience.com/13518-candy-chocolate-eaters-weigh.html
[10] http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-study-shows-children-and-adolescents-who-eat-candy-are-less-overweight-or-obese-124646403.html
[11] http://bigstory.ap.org/article/f9483d554430445fa6566bb0aaa293d1/ap-exclusive-how-candy-makers-shape-nutrition-science
[12] https://www.heartland.org/willie-soon
[13] http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/global-warming/climate-deniers/koch-industries/dr-willie-soon-a-career-fueled-by-big-oil-and-coal/
[14] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/us/ties-to-corporate-cash-for-climate-change-researcher-Wei-Hock-Soon.html
[15] https://insideclimatenews.org/news/23022015/guide-willie-soons-climate-research-funded-fossil-fuel-companies
[16] http://time.com/3724969/james-inhofe-snowball-senate/
[17] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/02/23/the-favorite-scientist-of-climate-change-deniers-is-under-fire-for-taking-oil-money/
[18] http://www.desmogblog.com/willie-soon
[19] http://energydesk.greenpeace.org/2015/12/08/exposed-academics-for-hire/
[20] http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323528404578452483656067190
[21] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2642410-Email-Chain-Happer-O-Keefe-and-Donors-Trust.html
[22] http://www.wired.com/2015/12/senate-gopers-ran-a-really-weird-hearing-on-climate-change/
[23] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/08/greenpeace-exposes-sceptics-cast-doubt-climate-science
[24] https://twitter.com/hashtag/COP21?src=hash
[25] https://t.co/xMyxNzdrEZ
[26] https://t.co/eEFDpn2pa5
[27] https://twitter.com/GreenpeaceUK/status/674236745710305280
[28] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2642398-Email-Chain-Frank-Clemente.html
[29] http://www.mcall.com/opinion/mc-fossil-divestment-clemente-con-20150321-story.html
[30] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-09/academic-returns-hits-back-at-greenpeace-claims-he-is-for-hire/7015140
[31] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/06/us/food-industry-enlisted-academics-in-gmo-lobbying-war-emails-show.html?_r=0
[32] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/09/05/us/document-chassy.html
[33] http://usrtk.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Sachs-AR.pdf
[34] http://academicsreview.org
[35] https://www.wbez.org/shows/wbez-news/u-of-i-professor-did-not-disclose-gmo-funding/eb99bdd2-683d-4108-9528-de1375c3e9fb
[36] http://academicsreview.org/2015/09/the-usrtk-foia-campaign-against-academics-40-plus-years-of-public-science-research-and-teaching-under-assault/
[37] http://globalnews.ca/news/2414720/documents-reveal-canadian-teenager-the-target-of-gmo-lobby/
[38] https://www.buzzfeed.com/brookeborel/when-scientists-email-monsanto?utm_term=.mnkaEYL4D#.bqDAz7jdZotech-seed-front-burner
[39] http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2014-05-09/news/os-ed-gmos-front-burner-pro-20140508_1_gmo-biotech-seed-front-burner
[40] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stacy-malkan/pr-firm-attacks-organic-food-then-pitches-itself-to-organic-companies_b_9462308.html
[41] http://www.gainesville.com/news/20150828/uf-prof-donates-monsanto-grant-to-food-pantry/1
[42] http://kfolta.blogspot.com/2016/07/im-not-pro-gmo.html
[43] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/09/06/us/document-shaw.html?_r=0
[44] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2303692-david-shaw-missstateuniverdocs.html#document/p37/a237740
[45] https://www.motherjones.com/files/monsanto-sachs-juma.pdf
[46] https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2014/12/02/green-genes-sustainability-advantages-of-herbicide-tolerant-and-insect-resistant-crops/
[47] http://www.truthwiki.org/genetic-literacy-project/
[48] https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2013/06/17/meet_calestous_juma_africas_genetically_modified_crop_optimist.html
[49] https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2014/12/09/global-risks-of-rejecting-agricultural-biotechnology/
[50] https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/10/01/harvard-professor-failed-disclose-monsanto-connection-paper-touting-gmos/lLJipJQmI5WKS6RAgQbnrN/story.html
[51] http://www.denverpost.com/2016/03/23/cu-nutrition-expert-who-took-coca-cola-money-steps-down/
[52] http://bigstory.ap.org/article/ce372c3d89d442a79458e6d32e713865/apnewsbreak-emails-reveal-cokes-role-anti-obesity-group
[53] http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/coca-cola-funds-scientists-who-shift-blame-for-obesity-away-from-bad-diets/?_r=0
[54] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/anti-obesity-group-funded-by-coke-global-energy-balance-network-disbanding/
[55] http://www.alternet.org/food/soda-sales-decline-qa-rebecca-spector-center-food-safety
[56] http://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/dga2010/DietaryGuidelines2010.pdf
[57] https://sole.hsc.wvu.edu/Apps/Directory/CVView.aspx?id=41687
[58] http://www.wvgazettemail.com/article/20150810/DM01/150819949
[59] http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/news/200/gregory-hand-forced-out-as-dean-of-west-virginia-school-of-public-health-amid-controversy-over-coca-cola-funding/
[60] https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2014/12/11/economic-consequences-of-regulations-of-gm-crops/
[61] http://thestarphoenix.com/news/local-news/group-questions-u-of-s-profs-monsanto-link
[62] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on 13 Academics Who Have Become Shills for Corporate Giants in the Food, Agrochemical and Fossil Fuel Industries
[63] http://www.alternet.org/
[64] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
==
maybe rep: 2x
http://investigativereportingworkshop.org/investigations/the_koch_club/story/Koch_millions_spread_influence_through_nonprofits/
...
The Kochs have been involved in influencing higher education for more than 30 years, beginning with what is now called the Mercatus Center and the Institute for Humane Studies, both based at George Mason University in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. Between 2007 and 2011, the Kochs gave $30.5 million to 221 universitiesthrough their charitable foundations. More than half of that giving, roughly $16 million, has gone to George Mason University and its foundation. Recently, however, the Koch brothers’ influence has expanded outside Northern Virginia and created potential conflicts of interest for the universities accepting their donations.
The May-June 2012 issue of Academe, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors, focused on corporate influence in higher education. Kent Miller and Ray Bellamy wrote about the Koch influence in the Florida State University economics department. The Charles G. Koch Foundation offered to give the university $1.5 million to hire two assistant professors and fund fellowships and undergraduate curriculum on free-enterprise topics. The foundation appointed an advisory board that would award money to faculty and make sure that the work they completed fit with the foundation’s mission. Miller and Bellamy wrote, “In exchange for his ‘gift,’ the donor got to assign specific readings, select speakers brought to campus and instruct them with regard to the focus of their lectures, shape the curriculum with new courses and specify the number of students in the courses, name the program’s director, and initiate a student club.”
It’s not just at Florida State, which was a high-profile case, but also at other universities where the Kochs and John Allison, retired chairman and CEO of the financial institution BB&T, have donated money. Allison is on the board of directors at the Mercatus Center, which is funded by the Kochs, and following an intense fight in which the Kochs backed him, is now the president of the Cato Institute. BB&T sponsors chaired professors, typically in economics departments, and the universities where they sponsor a chaired professor often line up with where the Kochs donate.
An Investigative Reporting Workshop analysis found that the Kochs had donated to 10 universities where there were BB&T-chaired professors, including West Virginia University, Clemson University and smaller universities, such as Hampden-Sydney College and Barton College. According to Inside Higher Ed in 2011, Clemson “spent several years cultivating the Charles G. Koch Foundation to support its Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism, and has received $1 million thus far.”
At the core of the Kochs’ philosophy are the works of Ayn Rand, the objectivist philosopher and author of “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged” (Rand’s writings are also emblematic of the readings recommended to students by the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University). The new course that the Charles G. Koch Foundation wanted approved at Florida State was called “Market Ethics: The Vices, Virtues, and Values of Capitalism,” featuring the work of Rand as required by the memorandum of understanding. Through their charitable foundations, the Kochs gave $100,000 to the Ayn Rand Institute from 2009 to 2011.
And in the interest of full disclosure, in the course of this investigation, we discovered that American University, where the Investigative Reporting Workshop is based (within the School of Communication), received $17,500 in two separate grants from the Charles G. Koch Foundation. The university’s Office of Special Programs (OSP) reports that both grants are for a program called “Lectures in Classical Liberalism,” which is under the direction of Tom Merrill and Alan Levine. Both professors are in the School of Public Affairs.
OSP said the following language describes the program that the grants supported:
“We seek to build on and expand the program of lectures in classical liberalism funded by the Koch Foundation to date. At least two of these lectures would be designated “Koch Lectures on Classical Liberalism”; all of the funded lectures, however, will discuss some aspect of classical liberalism whether in its theoretical and historical roots or in its contemporary applications. This series of lectures is primarily designed to encourage our students to have a sustained engagement with the ideas of classical liberalism, and secondarily at presenting an opportunity for classical liberal ideas to be heard in the larger university community and the D.C. policy conversation. To that end, we also require our speakers to meet and take questions from our students in an informal session separate from the public lecture, either in one of our classes or in a breakfast or lunch session during the speaker’s campus visit.”
==
refd above academe 2012
https://www.aaup.org/article/fine-print-restrictive-grants-and-academic-freedom#.UdARVT7TWqw
Fine Print, Restrictive Grants, and Academic Freedom
The limits to “free” in free-market foundation donations at Florida State University.
By Kent S. Miller and Ray Bellamy
When the representatives of the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation came to Tallahassee in 2007 with checkbook in hand, they had every reason to expect a warm reception from Florida State University. Florida, along with much of the nation, was busy transferring money from higher education to prisons, and FSU was hurting.
T. K. Wetherell, FSU’s president at the time, had this to say about the Koch Foundation’s generous proposed donation to the economics department: “In these difficult economic times, it is more important than ever that public universities find ways to partner with the private sector to develop the sorts of programs that our society will need in coming decades.”
Then, as now, the governor’s office, the legislature, and the judicial system in Florida were dominated by strong conservatives who held much in common ideologically with the Koch brothers, longtime libertarians whose fortunes place them among the richest people in America. Moreover, one-fifth of the faculty in FSU’s economics department already identified themselves as free-market, antiregulation economists; several professors had strong national reputations for work in this area. The chair of the department, Bruce Benson, was quite open with the St. Petersburg Times about his perspective: “The Kochs find, as I do, that a lot of regulation is actually detrimental and they’re convinced markets work relatively well when left alone. . . . I agree with what they believe, whether they give us money or not.”
There is nothing unique about the Koch brothers’ offer to Florida State. The Koch Foundation has been quietly influencing universities across the country for years; its own list of funded programs for 2011 includes 187 colleges and universities. But much can be learned from events as they have developed in Tallahassee.
The foundation proposed a donation of nearly $6.6 million, with a $1.5 million initial grant to hire staff and fund fellowships and new undergraduate programs. An agreement was reached, and the program got off the ground without much publicity in its first years. By spring 2011, however, some muttering about outside influence on academic matters could be heard on campus and in town. The two of us knew no one in the economics department, but because we have long-term ties with FSU, we decided to take a look at the donor grant agreement and memorandum of understanding between the Charles Koch Foundation, the FSU Foundation, and the FSU economics department.
The provisions called for the appointment of five professors as well as other staff members, the establishment of a Program for the Study of Political Economy and Free Enterprise and a Program for Excellence in Economic Education, and the development of educational programs for undergraduates. The money had strings attached: the major one was the appointment of an advisory board chosen by the Koch Foundation. The board would determine which faculty candidates would qualify to receive funding, review all publicly provided material submitted by applicants for the professorship positions, and review the work of the professors to make sure it complied with the “objectives and purposes” of the foundation. Several clauses made clear that the Koch Foundation could pick up the marbles and go home if dissatisfied.
Before publishing a coauthored op-ed in the Tallahassee Democrat in May 2011, we took our concerns to both the current FSU president, Eric Barron, and the dean of the College of Social Sciences and Public Policy, David Rasmussen. Barron, who hadn’t been president at the time the agreement was signed, said that he had reviewed the documents and didn’t see a problem. Rasmussen told us that the university had not hired anyone who would not have been hired otherwise, that the grant had facilitated the recruitment of two excellent assistant professors and high-quality graduate students, and that it had created new postdoctoral opportunities. He told us, as he subsequently told the St. Petersburg Times, that not taking the money would have been “irresponsible.”
On the face of it, the memorandum of understanding seemed to have the potential to do serious damage to academic freedom and faculty governance. When a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, Kris Hundley, noticed our article and wrote a news piece, the story went viral, provoking a flood of dueling op-eds, editorials, petitions, and blog posts across the state and the nation. Some of the commentary was reasonably informed; much of it was not. The high visibility of the Koch brothers certainly helped give the story legs.
From the start, there was a misplaced emphasis in the media, with most of the attention going to the hiring of faculty. We thought the long-range damage would more likely come from the impact on the curriculum, with the Koch Foundation effectively having access to thousands of undergraduate students.
Defenders of the grant tended to concentrate on a limited set of arguments: universities can’t function without outside help; all grants come with strings attached; donors have a right to say how their money is spent; conservative ideas don’t get a fair shake because of the number of liberal professors; no one complains about the influence of liberal funders; intellectual diversity is absent in state universities; the attack on the Kochs is politically driven.
We agree that outside funds are necessary and that donors have a right to specify in general the areas of focus for their gifts and to receive an accounting of how their money is spent—but nothing beyond that. All ideas should be welcomed at a university; the politics of the giver should not be a disqualifying factor. That is the essence of academic freedom. We would hope that any grant from any foundation that had the provisions and restrictions of this one would evoke an identical response from us.
The Faculty Senate Weighs In
As the controversy continued to expand into the summer, FSU’s president acted on a suggestion the two of us made at the outset in our editorial and asked the faculty senate to examine the issues surrounding the grant. He requested a quick response, presumably to get the problem behind him before he initiated a $1 billion fundraising drive.
A five-person committee, consisting of former presidents of the faculty senate and a former president of the university, went to work. They reviewed documents and conducted interviews with current and former members of the economics department, university administrators, and other interested people.
The committee’s first finding was that the appointment of faculty had been properly managed but that there were clauses in the agreement that could lead to undue outside influence in the appointment process:
- The agreement expressed an inappropriate interest in the selection of the department chair, withholding money unless the current chair was given a raise and continued to serve until the program was implemented.
- The terms of the agreement raised concerns about a new undergraduate program, including the selection of a program director to supervise activities and the creation of a new course with prescribed content.
- The teaching of large gateway courses that would reach an estimated seven thousand students a year in sections containing up to five hundred students was ceded to a subset of the department.
- The implementation of the project was characterized by conflicts of interest and a lack of transparency.
The report concluded with a number of specific recommendations, including ending donor-funded appointments unless modifications are made to the agreement; restructuring the advisory committee; prohibiting future donor agreements that include donor evaluations in the annual evaluation files of faculty; suspending approval of Economics 3131, Market Ethics, until the course’s relationship to the donor agreement is made clear to and the course is reapproved by the university curriculum committee; and reviewing the FSU Foundation’s policies concerning gifts that specify conditions about faculty appointments, faculty evaluation, and the curriculum.
Reactions to the senate report were mixed. Some FSU faculty who spoke to us believe that the committee punted on many of the tougher questions when it elected to focus only on safeguards for future donor grants. A much stronger review of the process might have altered subsequent events.
President Barron seemed pleased by the outcome, telling the media, “We acted with a high level of integrity and followed the normal course of events, in that the faculty picked the faculty they wanted to work with.” He went on to say the agreement “leaves open the possibility” that Koch could have more influence over hiring and course development than was intended.
The Koch Foundation’s director of higher education programs put a good face on the report: “We are pleased that this review of the facts by the faculty committee confirms what FSU administrators have said—that the foundation protected academic integrity and added significant value to FSU.”
As the 2011 fall semester got under way, the story moved out of the spotlight, and there was a return to business as usual. It seemed that many of the major players felt vindicated, and the grant was expected to continue with only cosmetic changes. A new course based on Koch objectives, Market Ethics: The Vices, Virtues, and Values of Capitalism, featuring the work of objectivist Ayn Rand as required by the memorandum of understanding, was to go back through the standard approval procedures. A university committee was charged with developing policies to control future grants. There was a little talk about the need for increased transparency.
At that point we decided to follow up on a faculty senate recommendation that multiple donor agreements involving more than one college at the university be reviewed.
The Demands of BB&T
In attempting to gain a foothold in universities, the Kochs often work in tandem with other groups that share their values. The foundation formed by John Allison, former CEO of the regional financial-services holding company BB&T, is a frequent collaborator with the Kochs, reaching out primarily to economics departments and schools of business. Learning that the BB&T Charitable Foundation had made a grant to FSU in 2008, we asked our university’s foundation for a copy of the agreement. We received a bare-bones, two-page document that announced a $3 million contribution to encourage a thorough discussion of the moral foundations of capitalism. The document contained a reference to an attached letter that detailed the specific conditions of the grant. We requested a copy of this letter and learned it contained the meat of the arrangement.
There was no ambiguity about how the money was to be spent:
- The Department of Economics would create a new course, Morals and Ethics in Economic Systems, with Ayn Rand as required reading. The course would be offered by the College of Social Sciences to 108 students each term, and the size of the class would eventually increase to as many as five hundred students. The course was also to be offered online.
- The Department of Finance would add additional readings and course content in free markets, selfinterest, and individualism to its current required coursework.
- Every undergraduate student in the College of Business and all graduate students in finance and economics would receive a copy of Atlas Shrugged, and discussion groups would explore the book’s themes.
- A distinguished speakers series would be created, with presentations focused on the “core values of the free-enterprise system” and the “moral and ethical foundations of capitalism.” The Ayn Rand Institute would be consulted for the list of the recommended speakers.
- Two program professorships would be awarded, and they would play key roles in developing and promoting the free-enterprise curriculum in the classroom.
- Because of the importance of the program, it would be initially codirected by the heads of the economics and finance departments.
- The program would sponsor and support the Students in Free Enterprise club.
Could these provisions be considered intrusive? In exchange for his “gift,” the donor got to assign specific readings, select speakers brought to the campus and instruct them with regard to the focus of their lectures, shape the curriculum with new courses and specify the number of students in the courses, name the program’s directors, and initiate a student club. BB&T also received a disturbing amount of free online advertising through the web pages of FSU’s BB&T Center for Free Enterprise.
We do not know how thoroughly the college has obeyed Allison’s instructions. But if there is any concern about avoiding even the appearance of outside interference in the university, we are in trouble.
The university has never existed as an ivory tower, but the ideals of academic freedom, the search for truth, scientific integrity, open debate, and faculty control of the curriculum are worth defending. The university should be a place where the search for and transfer of knowledge are not shaped by outside money.
The BB&T Foundation and similar donors are right, however, that no one is forced to take their money. Agreement comes only with a willing seller and a willing buyer. Thus, when things go wrong, it is because the university has been complicit with the foundation. We hope that the appropriate bodies at FSU will be paying closer attention in the future.
Lessons from Florida State University
Many of the elements in this sad story are present in similar grants to hundreds of colleges and universities across the country. If FSU, or any other institution, is serious about setting up policies to “avoid anything like this happening in the future,” as President Barron said, certain background features need to be considered.
One problem is that most donor contracts are negotiated by administrators and are brought to the faculty late or not at all. The great majority of the faculty often have no knowledge of the existence of grants like the two discussed here.
Transparency is a stranger in such grant making. In the course of our research we learned that it is not unusual for important provisions not to be put on the record but made abundantly clear to the recipient. The grantor usually includes a provision that gives it the ability to discontinue funding if dissatisfied with a program.
We repeatedly heard from administrators that it is standard practice for gifts to come with strings attached. Aside from the question of whether the conditions should be there in the first place, the issue, of course, is how many strings there are and what kinds of stipulations they present. (The meaning of gift—something passed on without expectation of recompense—has been corrupted.)
The concept of academic freedom is relatively plastic. What the two of us see as intrusive actions are highly acceptable to some. The president of the university and the dean of the college apparently saw no problem with the Koch grant. If somebody wants to give some money to read a book, the dean was quoted as saying, why not? The chair of the economics department announced that he would be happy to teach the writings of Ayn Rand—although he apparently had not considered doing so until the money came along. But guidelines regarding academic freedom are quite specific, and we need to do a better job of educating ourselves about their significance. Otherwise, the university becomes just another corporation subject to the market.
Supporters of the Koch grant make an interesting assessment of students’ ability to think for themselves. They portray students as being brainwashed over the years by liberal professors, but when someone expresses concern about the heavy dosage of ideology that comes to undergraduates as a result of the BB&T grants, the response is, “What? You don’t think students have the ability to sort things out for themselves?”
The Koch brothers, BB&T, and their like-minded partners are not going away. They are organized, committed to their cause, focused on pushing their ideology through the educational system, in the game for the long run, and well funded.
Faculty members need to get involved in the grant-review process from the start by demanding more transparency and refusing to be compliant. The fact that most faculty members are now serving in contingent appointments increases the need to defend academic freedom.
In hard times such as these, when there is too much work and too little time, the faculty must resist the temptation to close the door to the office or lab and say, “It’s probably okay. Besides, I don’t have the time to read the fine print.”
Kent S. Miller is emeritus professor of psychology at Florida State University. His e-mail address isksmiller@fsu.edu.
Ray Bellamy is an orthopedic surgeon in private practice at Tallahassee Orthopedic Clinic and director for surgery at the Tallahassee regional campus of the FSU College of Medicine. His e-mail address is ray_bellamy@ yahoo.com.
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http://energydesk.greenpeace.org/2015/12/08/exposed-academics-for-hire/
sting: GP
A Greenpeace undercover investigation has exposed how fossil fuel companies can secretly pay academics at leading American universities to write research that sows doubt about climate science and promotes the companies’ commercial interests.
Posing as representatives of oil and coal companies, reporters from Greenpeace UK asked academics from Princeton and Penn State to write papers promoting the benefits of CO2 and the use of coal in developing countries.
The professors agreed to write the reports and said they did not need to disclose the source of the funding.
Citing industry-funded documents – including testimony to state hearings and newspaper articles – Professor Frank Clemente of Penn State said: “In none of these cases is the sponsor identified. All my work is published as an independent scholar.”
Leading climate-sceptic academic, Professor William Happer, agreed to write a report for a Middle Eastern oil company on the benefits of CO2 and to allow the firm to keep the source of the funding secret.
Happer is due to appear this afternoon as a star witness in Senate hearings called by Republican Presidential candidate Ted Cruz.
In emails to reporters he also revealed Peabody Energy paid thousands of dollars for him to testify at a separate state hearing, with the money being paid to a climate-sceptic think tank.
Read the emails with Professor Frank Clemente
Read the emails with Professor :{Happer and the Donors Trust}:
The investigation also found:
- US coal giant PeabodyEnergy also paid tens of thousands of dollars to an academic who produced coal-friendly research and provided testimony at state and federal climate hearings, the amount of which was never revealed.
- The Donors Trust, an organisation that has been described as the “dark money ATM” of the US conservative movement, confirmed in a taped conversation with an undercover reporter that it could anonymously channel money from a fictional Middle Eastern oil and gas company to US climate sceptic organisations.
- Princeton professor William Happer laid out details of an unofficial peer review process run by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a UK climate sceptic think tank, and said he could ask to put an oil-funded report through a similar review process, after admitting that it would struggle to be published in an academic journal.
- A recent report by the GWPF that had been through the same unofficial peer review process, was promoted as “thoroughly peer-reviewed” by influential columnist Matt Ridley-a senior figure in the organisation.
The findings echo the case of Willie Soon, who was the subject of an investigation published in the New York Times earlier this year. The investigation revealed that Soon had accepted donations from fossil fuel companies and anonymous donors in return for producing climate-sceptic scientific papers. He described his studies as “deliverables” and failed to declare who paid for the research.
The revelations also follow a series of reports showing fossil fuel companies burying the truth about climate change, while funding flawed research to cast doubt on the scientific consensus.
Academics for hire
Reporters approached the academics claiming to be representatives of unnamed fossil fuel companies – one, a Middle Eastern oil and gas exploration company, the other a coal mining firm based in Indonesia – looking to commission “independent” research.
“In none of these cases is the sponsor identified. All my work is published as an independent scholar.” – Professor Frank Clemente
The individuals approached have previously been linked to fossil fuel companies or climate sceptic organisations that have received fossil fuel funding.
Professor Frank Clemente, a sociologistfrom Penn State university, was asked if he could produce a report “to counter damaging research linking coal to premature deaths (in particular the World Health Organization’s figure that 3.7 million people die per year from fossil fuel pollution)”.
He said that this was within his skill set; that he could be quoted using his university job title; and that it would cost around $15,000 for an 8–10 page paper. He also explained that he charged $6,000 for writing a newspaper op-ed.
When asked whether he would need to declare where the money came from, Professor Clementesaid: “There is no requirement to declare source funding in the US.”
Clemente is a favourite of the coal industry and particularly Peabody Energy, whichregularly uses his research as evidence of the need for an expansion of coal power in developing countries.
Following the report Clemente produced an
op-ed arguing against the coal divestment movement in universities, which was picked up by over 50 newspapers across the US. But as Clemente told undercover reporters: “In none of these cases is the sponsor identified. All my work is published as an independent scholar.”
Professor Clemente failed to respond to requests for comment.
Investigators also approached Professor William Happer of Princeton University, who is chairman of the climate scepticGeorge Marshall Institute and a former Director of Energy Research at theUS Department of Energy under the first President Bush where he “supervised all of DOE’s work on climate change”.
Professor Happer, who is a physicist rather than a climatologist, told Greenpeace reporters that he would be willing to produce research promoting the benefits of carbon dioxide for $250 per hour. He asked that the money be paid to climate sceptic campaign group, the CO2 Coalition, of which he is a board member.
Happer described his work on carbon dioxide as a “labor of love”and said that while other pollutants produced by burning fossil fuels are a problem, in his opinion “More CO2 will benefit the world”, adding “The only way to limit CO2 would be to stop using fossil fuels, which I think would be a profoundly immoral and irrational policy.”
When reporters asked if it would be possible for the fossil fuel client’s role in commissioning the research to remain hidden, in order to give the work more credibility, Happer replied that: “If I write the paper alone, I don’t think there would be any problem stating that ‘the author received no financial compensation for this essay.’”
Happer also disclosed that Peabody Energy paid $8,000 in return for his testimony in a crucialMinnesota state hearing on the impacts of carbon dioxide. This fee was also paid to the CO2 Coalition.
“I am trying get [sic] another mysterious client to donate funds to the CO2 Coalition instead of compensating me for my writing something for them.” – Professor Happer
The academics’ willingness to conceal the source of funding contrasts strongly with the ethics of journals such as Science, which states in itssubmission requirements that research “should be accompanied by clear disclosures from all authors of their affiliations, funding sources, or financial holdings that might raise questions about possible sources of bias”.
Late last month Happer appeared at aclimate sceptic summit in Texas. There he defended CO2 production saying: “Our breath is not that different from a power plant.” He went on to say, “If plants could vote, they would vote for coal”.
Hiding the money trail
The investigation has also revealed a system by which oil and gas companies can anonymously fund US climate-sceptic scientists and organisations.
When asked to ensure that the commissioning of the report could not be traced back to the Middle East oil and gas company, Professor Happer contacted his fellow CO2 Coalition board member, Bill O’Keefe, explaining: “I am trying get [sic] another mysterious client to donate funds to the CO2 Coalition instead of compensating me for my writing something for them.”
O’Keefe, a formerExxon lobbyist, suggested channelling it through the Donors Trust, a controversial organisation that has previously been called the“Dark Money ATM” of the US conservative movement.
The organisation has a long history of channelling funding to US climate sceptics, including controversial professor Willie Soon, and some of the most influential organisations in the US conservative movement, including Americans for Prosperity, the Heartland Institute and the American Enterprise Institute.
When investigators asked Peter Lipsett of the Donors Trust if the Trust would accept money from an oil and gas company based in the Middle East, he said that, although the Trust would need the cash to come from a US bank account, “we can take it from a foreign body, it’s just we have to be extra cautious with that.”
He added that: “I’ll double check everything and make sure I’m wording things correctly after chatting with our CFO [Chief Financial Officer], but what he’s told me before is that the preference is to have it in US dollars, and the ideal preference is to have it originate from a US source, but the US dollars is the important bit”.
[sound file]
Peter Lipsett isdirector of growth strategies at the Donors Trust and has worked in a senior position for Charles Koch, and before that Koch Industries for almost a decade. When contacted for on the record comment, Mr Lipsett said:
“We only accept donations in U.S. currency and drawn from U.S. banks. Donors Trust has never accepted secret donations from foreign donors. We have supported over 1,500 organizations representing the arts, medicine and science, public policy, education, religion, and civics. We are no more a “middle man” between donors and their causes than any other community or commercial donor-advised fund sponsoring organization”.
Mr O’Keefe said: “As a matter of personal policy, I do not respond to requests such as yours.”
Peer review
As well as exposing how fossil fuel companies are able to anonymously commission scientific research, Greenpeace can reveal details of a so-called “peer review” process being operated by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a UK climate sceptic think tank.
Sense About Science, a UK charitable trust, describes peer review as the process by which “scientists submit their research findings to a journal, which sends them out to be assessed for competence, significance and originality, by independent qualified experts who are researching and publishing work in the same field (peers).” The process usually involves varying degrees of anonymity.
“I would be glad to ask for a similar review for the first drafts of anything I write for your client. Unless we decide to submit the piece to a regular journal, with all the complications of delay, possibly quixotic editors and reviewers that is the best we can do, and I think it would be fine to call it a peer review.” – Professor Happer
Professor Happer, who sits on the GWPF’sAcademic Advisory Council, was asked by undercover reporters if he could put the industry funded report through the same peer review process as previous GWPF reports they claimed to have been “thoroughly peer reviewed”. Happer explained that this process had consisted of members of the Advisory Council and other selected scientists reviewing the work, rather than presenting it to an academic journal.
He added: “I would be glad to ask for a similar review for the first drafts of anything I write for your client. Unless we decide to submit the piece to a regular journal, with all the complications of delay, possibly quixotic editors and reviewers that is the best we can do, and I think it would be fine to call it a peer review.”
GWPF’s “peer review” process was used for a recent GWPF report on the benefits of carbon dioxide. According to Dr Indur Goklany, the author of the report, he was initially encouraged to write it by the journalist Matt Ridley, who is also a GWPF academic advisor. That report was then promoted by Ridley, who claimed in his Times column that the paper had been“thoroughly peer reviewed”.
Sense About Science, which lists Ridley as a member of its Advisory Council, has warned against such review processes, saying: “sometimes organisations or individuals claim to have put their studies through peer review when, on inspection, they have only shown it to some colleagues. Such claims are usually made in the context of a campaign directed at the public or policy makers, as a way of trying to give scientific credibility to certain claims in the hope that a non-scientific audience will not know the difference.”
The organisation also says that: “reporters or advocates citing these sources as peer reviewed would show themselves to be biased or uninformed”.
Professor Happer claimed that the review of the paper was “more rigorous than the peer review for most journals”. But he also told undercover reporters that he believed most members of the Academic Advisory Council had been too busy to comment on the paper:
“I know that the entire scientific advisory board of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) was asked to submit comments on the first draft. I am also sure that most were too busy to respond,” he said.
Professor Happer also noted that submitting a report on the benefits of carbon dioxide to a peer-reviewed scientific journal would be problematic.
“That might greatly delay publication and might require such major changes in response to referees and the journal editor that the article would no longer make the case that CO2 is a benefit, not a pollutant, as strongly as I would like, and presumably as strongly [as] your client would also like,” he said.
When asked about the review process behind Dr Goklany’s report, GWPF explained that the report had gone for review to other chosen scientists beyond just those in their Advisory Council and that: “the quality of Dr Goklany’s report is self-evident to any open-minded reader.”
Peabody Energy
The investigation raises further questions for coal giant Peabody Energy, which earlier this year was investigated by**New York attorney generalEric Schneidermanover accusations that they violated New York laws prohibiting false and misleading conduct, in relation to misleading statements on the risks it could face from tightening climate change laws. Peabody have now agreed to change the way it reports the risks posed to investors by climate change.
Professors Clemente and Happer were both employed by Peabody to provide testimony favourable to the company in state and governmental hearings. The company paid $8,000 for Professor Happer to make the case on the social costs of carbon.
Other prominent climate sceptics who provided testimony in the Minnesota hearing on behalf of Peabodyincluded: Roy Spencer who told Greenpeace he was paid $4,000 by Peabody; Richard Tolwho said he was not paid and Richard Lindzen and Robert Mendelsohn who failed to reply to questions. Tol, Lindzen and Mendelsohn are all members of the GWPF Academic Advisory Council.
Both Penn State and Princeton University declined to comment.
The GWPF said: “Professor Happer made his scientific views clear from the outset, including the need to address pollution problems arising from fossil fuel consumption. Any insinuation against his integrity as a scientist is outrageous and is clearly refuted by the correspondence.
“Nor did Professor Happer offer to put a report “commissioned by a fossil fuel company” through the GWPF peer review process. This is a sheer fabrication by Greenpeace.
“The cack-handed attempt by Greenpeace to manufacture a scandal around Dr Goklany’s report, and to smear Professor Happer’s reputation, only points to the need for the Global Warming Policy Foundation to redouble its efforts to bring balanced, rigorous and apolitical research on climate and energy policy issues to the public’s attention, as counter to the misleading noise and activist rhetoric from groups like Greenpeace.”
Journalist and GWPF Academic Advisor, Matt Ridley, did not respond to requests for comment.
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Jane M dark $ bk says 307 college koch $
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2005-14 100M$
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/connor-gibson/to-charles-koch-professor_b_9100904.html
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12/15
Charles Koch gave $90 million to influence higher ed in the South
Last month, the provost of Western Carolina University in North Carolina asked the public school's chancellor to approve an academic center funded by the Charles Koch Foundation, a private nonprofit run by the billionaire chairman, CEO, and co-owner of the Koch Industries oil and chemical corporation. The foundation funds academic programs, professorships, scholarships, conferences, lecture series and economics centers, all for the purpose of promoting the free-market agenda embraced by Koch and his brother David.
The chancellor has come out in support, and on Dec. 4 the school's trustees will vote on the fate of the Center for the Study of Free Enterprise, which would launch with $2 million from the Charles Koch Foundation over five years and $1.4 million from the university.
The proposed agreement has come under fire from the school's faculty senate, which voted 21-3 to oppose the center's creation. The group raised concerns about academic freedom, cost, reputation, and the lack of peer review.
"The Charles Koch Foundation has previously set forth explicit expectations in line with their political views in exchange for monetary gifts to universities," the faculty senate said in a statement, "thereby constraining academic freedom by influencing and interfering with the development of new knowledge."
The proposed center at WCU is part of a long campaign by Koch to influence higher education. The Charles Koch Foundation along with three other groups led by Koch gave nearly $108 million to 366 colleges and universities from 2005 to 2014, finds an Institute for Southern Studies investigation, building on research by Greenpeace. The other groups are the Fred and Mary Koch Foundation, the Claude R. Lambe Foundation, and the Charles Koch Institute. (For more about these groups, see "The Koch-led charities funding higher education" at the end of this story.)
Eighty-five percent of the donations — or $91 million — went to 147 Southern colleges and universities.
The bulk of the money given by the four nonprofits — $77.7 million — went to George Mason University, a public school in Fairfax, Virginia. Much of that went to the school's Mercatus Center and Institute for Humane Studies, nonprofits housed at the university that focus on teaching and promoting free-market economics. But even when the GMU donations are excluded from the total giving, Southern schools received 45 percent of the remaining contributions.
Besides GMU, the other schools that received the most money from the Koch foundations are all in the South: Florida State University at $2.3 million, West Virginia University at $1.3 million, Clemson University of South Carolina at $1.3 million, and Troy University of Alabama at $1.1 million.
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GMO
http://www.alternet.org/food/monsanto-scandal-biotech-giant-solicited-academics-fight-their-pro-gmo-war
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folta update
...Turns out that Monsanto executive solicited pro-GMO articles from university researchers, and passed the “research” off as independent science which the biotech giant then used to prop up its image and further its agenda.
We know this, thanks to thousands of pages of emails obtained by U.S. Right to Know (USRTK) under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). And because a host of news outlets—including the New York Times, the Boston Globe,Bloomberg, the StarPhoenix and others — are now running with the story.
For anyone who has paid attention, this latest scandal should come as no surprise. As Steven Druker writes in his book Altered Genes, Twisted Truth, "For more than 30 years, hundreds (if not thousands) of biotech advocates within scientific institutions, government bureaus, and corporate offices throughout the world have systematically compromised science and contorted the facts to foster the growth of genetic engineering, and get the foods it produces, onto our dinner plates.”
Will Druker’s book (published this year), and this new wave of bad press be enough to finally expose Monsanto’s “science” for what it i is — nothing more than an expensive, sustained and highly orchestrated public relations campaign?
The story behind the story
USRTK, a nonprofit funded almost entirely by the Organic Consumers Association, launched an investigation into “the collusion between Big Food, its front groups, and university faculty and staff to deliver industry PR to the public.”
As part of its ongoing investigation, the group filed FOIA requests to obtain the emails and documents from 43 public university faculty and staff. The requested documents included records from scientists, economists, law professors, extension specialists and communicators — all of whom, as the group points out, were conducting work in public institutions, all funded by taxpayers.
On its website, the group says, "We believe the public deserves to know more about the flow of money and level of coordination between public university scientists and other academics, and the agrichemical and food companies whose interests they promote."
And now we do. And we know exactly how the latest plan to deceive, involving a paid PR firm posing as an independent third party, was hatched.
According to Mother Jones, in an August 2013 email to nine prominent academics, Monsanto's strategic engagement lead Eric Sachs broached a plan: that the group would pen "short policy briefs on important topics in the agricultural biotechnology arena," chosen "because of their influence on public policy, GM crop regulation, and consumer acceptance."
Sachs assured the professors that the project would be handled discreetly. "I understand and appreciate that you need me to be completely transparent and I am keenly aware that your independence and reputations must be protected," he wrote. Two outside entities — an industry-funded group called the American Council on Science and Health and a PR outfit called CMA — would "manage the process of producing the policy briefs," "coordinate website posting and promotion," and "merchandize" the briefs by helping turn them into "op-eds, blog postings, speaking engagements, events, webinars, etc." This third-party management is "an important element," the Monsanto exec added, "because Monsanto wants the authors to communicate freely without involvement by Monsanto."
The explanation outlined by Mother Jones followed an articles by mainstream news outlets, including Bloomberg and the New York Times. Here’s a partial roundup of the coverage generated so far by USRTK’s investigation.
New York Times: ‘helped produce important payoffs’
In a September 5 article, New York Times reporter Eric Lipton credited USRTK with obtaining “thousands of pages” of emails, many of which the Times then requested on its own.
After reviewing the documents, and describing some of the email exchanges between Monsanto’s PR firm and academics who were solicited to write articles, Lipton concluded that Monsanto’s strategy was effective:
The efforts have helped produce important payoffs, including the approval by federal regulators of new genetically modified seeds after academic experts intervened with the United States Department of Agriculture on the industry’s behalf, the emails show.
Lipton singled out, among others, Kevin Folta, chairman of the horticultural sciences department at the University of Florida. Monsanto recruited Folta, Lipton wrote, ”to help with ‘biotechnology outreach’ and to travel around the country to defend genetically modified foods.”
Folta, who according to the Times became “part of an inner circle of industry consultants, lobbyists and executives who devised strategy on how to block state efforts to mandate G.M.O. labeling and, most recently, on how to get Congress to pass legislation that would pre-empt any state from taking such a step, received a $25,0000 grant from Monsanto to fund his travel and “outreach.” According to Bloomberg, the University of Florida donated the $25,000 to charity — after the Times story ran.
Despite the grant, and the incriminating emails revealed by the Times, Folta has long denied any “formal connection” to Monsanto. (USRTK provides a listof Folta’s many denials).
The Times also singled out Bruce M. Chassy, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois, who in 2011 received a grant for an undisclosed amount to support “biotechnology outreach and education activities." Emails obtained by the Times reveal that Chassy and a Monsanto executive talked about efforts to persuade the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to “abandon its proposal to tighten the regulation of pesticides used on insect-resistant seeds."
Bloomberg: ‘How Monsanto mobilized academics’
The headline on an article posted October 2 by Bloomberg said it all: ‘How Monsanto Mobilized Academics to Pen Articles Supporting GMOs.’
Bloomberg reported that the “undisclosed recruitment of scientists from Harvard University, Cornell University and three other schools to write about the benefits of plant biotechnology is drawing fire from opponents.”
The Bloomberg piece focused on how the Genetic Literacy Project, a clearly pro-GMO nonprofit that says its mission is “to disentangle science from ideology,” published articles by the scientists on its website, without disclosing that the articles had been solicited by Monsanto and its PR firm.
Despite its headline, however, the Bloomberg report bends over backwards to present Monsanto and the scientists’ arguments that their articles weren’t influenced by Monsanto’s PR firm, CMA Consulting, even going so far as to infer that there exists a scientific consensus that GMOs are safe with this statement: “The challenge for the pro-GMO lobby is the yawning gulf between scientific consensus and public perception.”
The existence of a scientific consensus on the safety of GMOs is widely disputed by international scientists.
Boston Globe: ‘Harvard Professor failed to disclose’
Taking the local angle approach, a reporter for the Boston Globe focused on a Harvard professor caught up in the scandal.
Reporter Laura Krantz wrote, "A Harvard Kennedy School professor wrote a widely disseminated policy paper last year in support of genetically modified organisms at the behest of seed giant Monsanto, without disclosing his connection, e-mails show."
Professor Calestous Jumanot is author of an article titled “Global Risks of Rejecting Agricultural Biotechnology,” published on the Genetic Literacy website. According to the Globe, in an email to Jumanot, Monsanto’s Eric Sachs, head of regulatory policy and scientific affairs suggested a topic, a summary and a headline. Jumanot chose a different headline, but the gist of the article conformed to the PR firm’s agenda.
As the Globe, the Times and others outlined, the Jumanot was one of nine professors who received emails from Sachs.
...
http://www.alternet.org/food/monsanto-scandal-biotech-giant-solicited-academics-fight-their-pro-gmo-war
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Senior academics at an Australian university are asking their bosses to pull the plug on a $4 million taxpayer funded research centre fronted by climate science contrarian Bjorn Lomborg.
The University of Western Australia (UWA) was given $4 million to establish the Australia Consensus Centre — a new arm of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, the US-registered think tank headed by Lomborg.
The cash grant came after more than $400 million was slashed for sciencefunding in the government’s 2014 budget.
Bjorn Lomborg, a favourite among conservatives and climate science deniers for his contrarian views on climate change, has claimed that while global warming is a problem, it should be placed well down a list of global priorities for aid and development spending.
DeSmogBlog investigations have found that Lomborg’s US arm has received funding from foundations with links to the billionaire Koch brothers and to billionaire “vulture capitalist” and major Republican donor Paul Singer.
UWA announced on April 2 that Lomborg would be given an adjunct Professor role at the university, but did not disclose the $4 million of taxpayer funding.
While Lomborg told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that he had worked with UWA to prepare a proposal for the government, it has been reported that the idea came from the office of Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who has said that “coal is good for humanity”.
UWA has also said it was approached by the government to house Lomborg’s centre, not the other way around.
Academics from UWA and elsewhere have expressed frustration that the $4 million was handed over without any apparent competitive process being carried out.
The university’s Student Guild launched a “Say NO to Bjørn Lomborg” campaign, saying the decision to offer the money toUWA was “politically motivated, and it is an insult to the staff and students” at the university.
The Copenhagen Consensus Center claims to do cost-benefit analysis of policies to tackle global problems and claims that targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions are too expensive and that climate change won’t begin to have negative impacts on the world’s economy until near the end of this century.
Dr Frank Jotzo, a leading climate economist at the Australian National University in Canberra, claimed in The Guardian that the Copenhagen Consensus Center methodology “has no academic credibility” and pointed to fundamental flaws in the way the CCC assessed the impacts of climate change.
On Friday, staff from across the University of Western Australia’s schools and departments packed out a lecture theatre for a special meeting in an attempt to get some answers from university administrators.
Professor Stuart Bunt, of the School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology, and vice president of the UWA Academic Staff Association, told DeSmogBlog:
Given the strength of feeling, many wanted to know if it was possible to cancel this. The question was rather ducked by the VC, Professor Paul Johnson. Our university prides itself on having high academic standards and selects staff very carefully. Some very young applicants, for example to our own school, have better publication records than Lomborg.
He said during the meeting, some were concerned how much academic freedom the Australia Consensus Centre might be able to have, given the reliance on government funding. “We were not reassured,” he said. “There’s a fear that people won’t be able to work without fear or favour.”
Bunt, who served 12 years on the university’s main decision-making Senate board, said academics were angry there had been a lack of consultation about the centre and Lomborg's appointment. He said it appeared the decision to appoint Lomborg and to establish the centre had been taken within a small group of university executives.
Bunt said he was also concerned that Lomborg’s work had been heavily criticised in the past. He said there appeared not to have been a risk analysis done on the impact that engaging with Lomborg might have on the university’s reputation.
Dr David Glance, the director of the Centre for Software Practice, told DeSmogBlog that some academics wanted to know if it was too late to cancel the centre entirely.
The main focus was staff wanting to know if there was an opportunity to reverse the decision. There was a lot of non-committal answers from Paul Johnson, the Vice Chancellor.
Glance said while the meeting started cordially, “it became less so towards the end” as frustrations began to rise. “People came out more depressed than when they went in,” he added.
DeSmogBlog was told by others in the meeting that academics expressed “shame and embarrassment” at the appointment of Lomborg and were “frustrated that they couldn’t get answers to their questions.”
In a highly critical letter released on the Conservation Bytes blog of Adelaide academic Corey Bradshaw, Professor Sarah Dunlop, Head of the School of Animal Biology at UWA, told university administrators that Lomborg’s academic record did not merit his appointment. The letter said:
Aside from the concerns expressed by others, the School is facing a difficult reputational challenge in terms of attracting high quality staff and students as well as establishing and maintaining national and international collaborations as a consequence of these events. As an example, an international Research Fellow has just informed us that, if Dr Lomborg’s adjunct appointment is confirmed, they will not bring their Fellowship to UWAbut, rather, transfer it to a more reputable University.
Additionally, existing PhD students in the School are concerned that this appointment will tarnish their accomplishments as graduates from this University. In addition, staff in the School have been inundated by correspondence from collaborators and stakeholders concerned about the University’s decision.
Professor Bunt said he was aware that other schools within UWA were considering drafting similar letters critical of the university’s decision.
UWA Adjunct Professor Paul Wills, of the School of Earth and Environment, told Fairfax media the appointment of Lomborg “tarnishes the reputation of the university.”
Dr Frank Jotzo, director of the Centre for Climate Economics and Policy at ANU, told The Guardian:
Within the research community, particularly within the economics community, the Bjorn Lomborg enterprise has no academic credibility. It is seen as an outreach activity that is driven by specific set of objectives in terms of bringing particular messages into the public debate and in some cases making relatively extreme positions seem more acceptable in the public debate.
Jotzo also said he believed the Copenhagen Consensus Centre was guilty of filtering out dissenting voices from its final recommendations.
The CCC has defended its methods, saying that Nobel Laureates and top economists have been engaged in the work.
UWA has said it will look to raise further funds for the Australia Consensus Centre. The CCC has said it would not accept cash from the fossil fuel industry.
http://www.desmog.uk/2015/04/24/academics-want-university-pull-plug-climate-contrarian-bjorn-lomborg-s-4million-consensus-center
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AlterNet [1] / By Steven Rosenfeld [2]
Brooklyn College Defends Academic Freedom By Saying No To Koch Millions For Its Business School
June 25, 2014 |
Brooklyn College of the City University of New York has a new academic credential.
Unlike an estimated 150 colleges and universities that have taken $56 million from the billionaire libertarian industrialist Koch brothers since the 1980s—and then integrated their extreme right-wing agenda into business classes while censoring other views—the New York City college keeps rejecting Koch cash, an aggrieved libertarian business school professor complained in a detailed report [3] by InsideHigherEd.com.
The libertarian professor, Mitchell Langbert [4], apparently approached the Charles C. Koch Foundation twice—in June 2013 and again this January—seeking multi-million dollar grants to expand Brooklyn College’s business faculty. Langbert’s effort, however, were apparently rejected by his supervisors, who did not want to pursue the grants.
“The professor said that in the summer of 2013, he was in unofficial but promising talks with representatives from the Koch Foundation about a$4.3 million grant to advance market-based economics at Brooklyn College,” Inside Higher Ed reported [5]. “The grant would have funded the hiring of multiple faculty members and graduate students, and established an honors program and an institute on markets at the college.”
“The professor said that in January, after more months of administrative “dithering,” he tried again to talk to Hopkins about creating an institute for the study of financial regulations on campus—this time funded by a possible $9.7 million grant from the Kochs,” they continued. “He said he was largely ignored, until earlier this month, when the dean told him via email—a copy of which was obtained by Inside Higher Ed—that he would have to “cut bait” on the project to focus on getting the business school accredited.”
Brooklyn College and the Charles G. Koch Foundation would not comment for Inside Higher Ed’s report. Langbert, however, accused business school deans of imposing their politics by not pursuing the Koch cash. “You wouldn’t think the administration would act in a devious way and develop a political stance,” he said.
Langbert’s accusations are completely upside down. But the matter goes beyond a lone professor who often feels like an outsider, as demonstrated on his blog [4] where he takes great offense at anyone who does not share his smarmy views.
The Kochs have been giving millions to academic institutions with a deliberate agenda to promote pro-corporate and anti-government philosophies, and hiding those requirements in their private grant agreements, said filmmaker Robert Greenwald, who just released Koch Brothers Exposed: 2014 Edition [6],which discussed the education grants.
“The Koch brothers have a long history of giving grants with strings attached,” he said. “Our research for Koch Brothers Exposed foundnumerous examples of universities that took money with academic requirements. And students and teachers have been resisting, saying that requiring any kind of ideological litmus test runs counter to the very ideals of free and open education and learning.”
Universities taking Koch funds vet whom lectures in business classes, Greenwald said, presenting mostly libertarian viewpoints to the students. Those requirements also include the books and other materials that are used in class, Greenwald said, saying that these materials—often funded with Koch grants—oppose regulation, government and labor.
Brooklyn College is not the only school that has said no to Koch cash. Late last year, 50 educators at The Catholic University of America signed a letter protesting a $1 million donation from the Charles Koch Foundation to help start a business school. They noted the “stark contrast between the Koch brothers’ public policy agenda and our Church’s traditional social justice teachings.”
“Given the troubling track record the foundation has in making gifts to universities that in some cases include unacceptable meddling in academic content and the hiring process of faculty, we urge you to be more transparent about the details of this grant. Charles and David Koch have an ideological agenda when it comes to shaping the national debate over economics and politics that is not simply academic in nature,” their letter said [7].
“The Koch brothers are billionaire industrialists who fund organizations that advance public policies that directly contradict Catholic teaching on a range of moral issues from economic justice to environmental stewardship. As you well know, Catholic social teaching articulates a positive role for government, an indispensable role for unions, just tax policies, and the need for prudent regulation of financial markets in service of the common good. We are concerned that by accepting such a donation you send a confusing message to Catholic students and other faithful Catholics that the Koch brothers’ anti- government, Tea Party ideology has the blessing of a university sanctioned by Catholic bishops.”
The faculty’s letter was followed by an online petition drive that gathered 33,000 signers. In late February, however, the university’s top dean and president wrote [8] an essay for The Wall Street Journal defending the Koch grant, saying that the objections to the Koch via their political work to defund anti-poverty programs and cripple unions was “a rather strong form of guilt by association.”
To its credit, the leaders at Brooklyn College’s business school know better.
See more stories tagged with:
brooklyn college [10],
Insider Higher Ed [11],
Mitchell Langbert [12],
robert greenwald [13],
Koch Brothers Exposed: 2014 Edition [14],
Catholic University of America [15],
academic freedom [16]
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Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/education/brooklyn-college-defends-academic-freedom-saying-no-koch-millions-its-business-school
Links:
[1] http://alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/steven-rosenfeld
[3] http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/06/25/professor-says-brooklyn-college-missed-chance-get-millions-koch-foundation#sthash.zAjOW4H5.W6pO8Rj1.dpbs
[4] http://mitchell-langbert.blogspot.com/
[5] http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/06/25/professor-says-brooklyn-college-missed-chance-get-millions-koch-foundation#ixzz35gobtdyV
[6] http://www.bravenewfilms.org/koch2014
[7] http://www.faithinpubliclife.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/FINAL-CUA-Letter.pdf
[8] http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/catholic-university-leaders-reject-criticism-of-koch-grant/
[9] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on Brooklyn College Defends Academic Freedom By Saying No To Koch Millions For Its Business School
[10] http://www.alternet.org/tags/brooklyn-college-0
[11] http://www.alternet.org/tags/insider-higher-ed
[12] http://www.alternet.org/tags/mitchell-langbert
[13] http://www.alternet.org/tags/robert-greenwald
[14] http://www.alternet.org/tags/koch-brothers-exposed-2014-edition
[15] http://www.alternet.org/tags/catholic-university-america
[16] http://www.alternet.org/tags/academic-freedom
[17] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
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The ALEC Board of Scholars includes[1]:
- Kay Coles James - President and Founder of the Gloucester Institute;[2] and formerly Senior Fellow and Director of "The Citizenship Project" at the Heritage Foundation, Dean of the School of Government at Regent University, Secretary of Health and Human Resources for former Virginia Governor George Allen (where she implemented Virginia's controversial welfare reform initiative), Director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management during George W. Bush's administration,[3] Senior Vice President of the Family Research Council, Associate Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy and Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services during George H.W. Bush's administration, member of the National Commission on Children during Ronald Reagan's administration, and Boardmember of Focus on the Family[4]
- Arthur B. Laffer - Inventor of the "Laffer Curve," often called "the father of supply-side economics," Co-chair of the Policy Council for the Free Enterprise Fund,[5] a lobbying organization founded by Stephen Moore and other Club for Growth members;[6] and formerly member of the Economic Policy Advisory Board during Ronald Reagan's administration and active in his 1980 and 1984 presidential campaigns, and Chief Economist at the Office of Management and Budget during Richard Nixon's administration[7]
- Stephen Moore - Founder of the Club for Growth and member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board[8] who has been called "a voodoo economist";[9] and formerly: Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, senior economist at the Joint Economic Committee under Chairman Dick Armey (TX) and Grover M. Hermann Fellow in Budgetary Affairs at the Heritage Foundation.[10]
- Victor Schwartz - Partner at the Washington D.C. offices of Shook, Hardy & Bacon, LLP -- a law and lobbying firm that has represented big tobacco companies such as Philip Morris (now Altria Group),[11] big pharmaceutical companies such as Bristol-Myers Squibb and GlaxoSmithKline,[12] and big technology companies such as Sprint Nextel,[13] Microsoft[14] and Sony.[15] He has been very active in the arena of tort reform and has been called "the undisputed king of tort reform."[16] and considered one of Washington, D.C.'s 50 top lobbyists;[17] Formerly a lawyer and lobbyist at Crowell & Moring for 21 years; Director of the Federal Insurance Administration from 1978-1980, and a professor and dean at the University of Cincinnati College of Law.[18]
- Richard Vedder - Economics professor at Ohio University,[19] and Senior Fellow at The Independent Institute[20] and theAmerican Enterprise Institute;[21] and formerly a commentator for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy on such issues as spending on public schools,[22], for the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution on issues such as immigration and labor, and Board member of the National Taxpayers Union.[23]
- Bob Williams - Founder and Senior Fellow of the Freedom Foundation-- previously known as the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, a libertarian organization whose mission "is to advance individual liberty, free enterprise, and limited, accountable government"--[24] Board Member of the State Policy Network and a "visiting fellow" at the Mercatus Center; and formerly an auditor for the Pentagon and Post Office, and a five term state legislator in Washington State.[25]
Scholars' Connections to Charles and David Koch
- Kay Coles James previously worked at the Heritage Foundation, which has received funding from the Koch Family Foundations.[26]
- Arthur B. Laffer’s Laffer Center for Global Economic Growth is tied to Koch Industries through its Vice Chairman, Richard Fink, and Executive Director Wayne Gable -- both prominent Koch executives -- and a $100,000 grant from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation in 2009.[27]
- Stephen Moore previously worked at the Cato Institute, which was co-founded by Charles G. Koch[28] and has been largely funded by the Koch Family Foundations,[29] and also at the Heritage Foundation, which has been funded byKoch money.[30]
- Bob Williams is a visiting fellow with George Mason University’s Mercatus Center State and Local Policy Project, a Charles Koch-funded project, to the tune of over $9 million since 2002.[31]
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