(Campus) Climate Change: facts fall; temperatures rise.

Grin & Bear It

Polar bears - thought to be a diminishing species, are managing better than we have been led to believe, at least according to an eminent scholar recently fired from her position at the University of Victoria. A "world-renowned expert in animal bone identification" claims she "lost her position at the University of Victoria (UVic), she believes for telling school kids politically incorrect facts about polar bears."

https://business.financialpost.com/opinion/was-this-zoologist-punished-for-telling-school-kids-politically-incorrect-facts-about-polar-bears

A More Apt Acronym?

Depending on who you talk to, Appointment Reappointment Promotion and Tenure (ARPT) committees - or is that TRAP committees? -  can behave like a pack of wild dogs or devoted Labrador Retrievers. They can do great good and may help create outstanding university departments, or they can be quite prone to dysfunction that leads to mediocrity or mayhem.

Bear Necessities

ARPT committees typically operate within strict guidelines designed to protect hiring/firing/retiring processes. Too often, it seems, those committees protect the processes more than the people those same processes should engage, respect and serve.

Jeffrey Foss, a former chair of UVic’s philosophy department, says Crockford has been punished for speaking her own mind about matters of fact, which means she has been denied academic freedom and free speech. “I’m beginning to lose faith and hope in the university system,” he says.

If, indeed, Dr. Crockford's scholarship serves the facts, her work might very well be a hammer that will bang nails into the closed lid of the coffin in which bad science (and a bad decision by a committee?) is laid to rest.

Bear Knuckle Fight

The FP reporter whose article is cited, a well known critic of aspects of contemporary climate research and a controversial author in her own right, may have correctly observed that

(t)he university is not protecting Crockford’s right to privacy. Instead, it is using a privacy smokescreen to protect members of a committee who have decided to purge an adjunct professor without reason or explanation.

Absent any other plausible explanation, Crockford has concluded that she was removed in order to suppress views on polar bears and related climate change issues and prevent her from continuing to challenge the high-profile academics who claim polar bear populations are in crisis.

G. Cornelis van Kooten, a UVic professor of economics who also holds a Canada Research Chair in environmental studies, says he is “appalled and distressed” by the Crockford removal. When, he asks, did “universities turn against open debate? There’s now a climate of fear on campus.”

The greatest threat to academic freedom is the behaviour of academics who, threatened by the work of other scholars, weaponize their positions and abandon the responsibility to engage ideas and to foster rational debate. The threat to our society is immense. The unwillingness to engage ideas and the loss of rigorous debate will result in academic communities becoming - if they haven't already - re-education camps wherein the worst kind of propaganda (e.g., that undermines inalienable rights) is fed to students who have little or no formation to enable them to distinguish fact from fiction. Universities will then produce citizens who, formed in fiction and eager to preserve their pleasant fiction(s), remain draped in ignorance and passively stand by while the state and public institutions commit additional injustices against people of conscience and against the truth.