The Nonsense Invasion of Knowledge, From Elizabeth Warren to Climategate

Virginia has long been at the forefront of letting money in politics turn educational institutions into ignorance mills. 

Part 3 of 'Mann & Corporate Person At UVA' (Here's Part 2.)

The problem with McDonnell is that he isn't, apparently, a legitimate Tea Partier, as Ken Cuccinelli never tires of reminding the Virginia political elite, first by sending letters to the Board of every university in the state in March 2010 advising them to rescind whatever policies they might have adopted to ban discrimination on the basis of sexual preference and effectively forcing the governor to enact a statewide policy explicitly banning such discrimination. Perhaps to compensate for this gesture with the freedom of discrimination-loving grassroots, McDonnell reinstated “Confederate History Month” the next month.

But Cuccinelli had another trick up his sleeve, thanks to “Climategate”, the endlessly publicized, wildly-misinterpreted scandal that ensued in the wake of an illegal hack into a server at the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit in Norwich, United Kingdom. The CRU has spearheaded research in paleoclimatology, the subdiscipline of paleontology devoted to studying the history of weather and the environment through the examination of tree rings, ice cores, sedimentary rock and other indicators of ancient weather patterns, since its founding 1972 by the “godfather” of field, Hubert Lamb. In 1993 current CRU director Phil Jones collaborated with the Amherst climate researcher Ray Bradley on the first attempt to “convert” the data they had gathered on ancient climate patterns into quantifiable temperature data; Bradley met Mann through his parents a few years later and an early version of the “hockey stick” was published in Nature in 1998. Needless to say, it is a field reliant on such a staggering array of highly sophisticated forms of expertise and highly specialized, relatively scarce data, that one could be forgiven for assuming a considerable amount of “collusion” inevitable—desirable even.

To the denial lobby, however, the talking point was obvious: global warming was a "warmist" conspiracy—and it didn’t take long to convince the grassroots. Within a week of the hacked emails’ first appearance on November 17, 2009 in the comments section of the denialist site Climate Audit, the Environmental Protection Agency was fielding ”citizen petitions” citing them as definitive proof that “Anthropogenic Global Warming is a hoax perpetuated by scientists in order to procure grant money and advance their personal agendas.”

By February Oklahoma senator James Inhofe upgraded the charges, releasing a report into what it claimed to suspect had been criminal acts of scientific misconduct and fraud and appending a list of seventeen “key players” on whom the probe would focus; the logical next step, one prolific denialosphere blogger soon explained in a lengthy post, was a sweeping Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations probe of the entire warmist cabal, from Al Gore on down.

The accusations were echoed in Cuccinelli’s civil investigative demand, although the Virginia statute he invoked to make his case had been enacted two years after the state had approved its last research grant to Michael Mann. But perhaps sensing that such a technicality would be unlikely to dissuade Cuccinelli, Albemarle County Circuit Court Judge Paul Peatross threw out the demand a first time with some gentle advice on the nature of “fraud.”

What the Attorney General suspects that Dr. Mann did that was false or fraudulent in obtaining funds from the Commonwealth is simply not stated. When the Court asked [deputy AG] Mr. Russell where it was stated in his brief the "nature of the conduct" of Dr. Mann that was a violation of the statute, Mr. Russell referred the Court to the first 15 pages of his Brief in Opposition to Petition. The Court has read with care those pages and understands the controversy regarding Dr. Mann's work on the issue of global warming. However, it is not clear what he did that was misleading, false or fraudulent…

The conspicuous criminal theft committed by the hacker(s) went meanwhile barely noticed by any formal halls of international justice whatsoever; the Norfolk police essentially gave up when the bill topped eighty thousand pounds, officially closing the investigation earlier this week by granting an  to the Guardian in which Detective Chief Superintendent Julian Gregory leaves the reader wondering how they managed to spend that much without actually interviewing anyone.

As a sociology professor, Teresa Sullivan led a social science equivalent of the “hockey team” with two legal scholars. Their tree rings and ice cores were 1,529 bankruptcy court filings, which they collected, scoured, coded and classified in a groundbreaking (and painstaking) effort to empirically analyze the consequences of accumulated corporate actions on everyday reality. As with the “hockey stick” the trend was unequivocal, although it bucked the prevailing theory of the early eighties, which attributed surging household bankruptcy filings to rampant cheating, fraud and beyond-means living among the lower and working classes. The evidence demonstrated just about everything but: financial deregulation and corporate cost-cutting appeared to be ultimately behind the preponderance of the growth in filings. Loans had gotten more predatory, insurance premiums no longer insured as much as they used to, pension funds were being sacked, layoffs never seemed to stop. Also as with the hockey team, the primary weakness of their research was the scope of its intellectual ambition: it required such massive feats of data collection—one member of the team recently recalled spending the early eighties around the country with a photocopier strapped into the seat next to her—and statistical analysis that it provided the denial lobby an inordinate number of openings for a disingenuous but rhetorically convincing hit piece. One bankruptcy law scholar’s attack on the first commercially-released resulting from their efforts consumed sixty pages of the Rutgers Law Review. A handful of scientists have made careers “discrediting” the hockey stick; all have themselves been legitimately discredited.

The Michael Mann figure of Sullivan’s team was her colleague and current Massachusetts senate candidate Elizabeth Warren. They share a lot of enemies. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, for one, has been at the forefront of the assault on the hockey stick since 2003, when it sued the Bush Administration for including the graph in an official report on climate change, on the basis of a dubious statute called the Data Quality Act. The outfit has invoked the constitution to marginalize Elizabeth Warren, first claiming her appointment to head the nascent regulatory agency she designed to be unconstitutional, and last month suing the Obama Administration on the basis that the agency’s existence itself is somehow unconstitutional. CEI has also been at the forefront of the fishing expedition into Mann’s time at UVA. And it was one of the earliest defenders of all the woebegone victims of a more recent fictitious megalomaniacal Obama Administration power play, the so-called War On Coal.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute is of course just one of the more visible units of a million-flack army of tax-exempt corporate speechifiers toiling each day to strangle all reality out of mainstream political discourse. It has a long and remarkable history of infesting American higher education, having succeeded in many departments of many schools at supplanting common notions of education, knowledge and scholarship with indoctrination, intellectual property and “agnotology”—that is, a term originally coined by the science historian Robert Proctor to denote the deliberate dissemination of doubt, confusion and/or ignorance within certain sectors of the populace.

Perhaps because of its geographic proximity to the federal government, public universities in Virginia seem to be exceptionally overrun; Proctor’s recent book on the tobacco industry, The Golden Holocaust, chronicles a period between the mid-thirties and the mid-sixties during which the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond, now part of Virginia Commonwealth University, operated almost as a subsidiary of the American Tobacco Company. And in 1961 a petition expressing college campus support of a House Un-American Activities Committee organized by John Birch Society co-founder Revilo Oliver drew 65 of its 139 signatures, weirdly, from Virginia Tech. And many of the early pioneers who can claim credit for founding the preeminent institution of academic agnotology within the law and economics departments of northern Virginia’s George Mason University started their higher education careers at UVA—as did the physicist S. Fred Singer and the environmental scientist Patrick J. Michaels, two of the most notorious veterans of the science denial lobby most recently affiliated with GMU.

Needless to say this is a plot that doesn’t stop thickening. It’s impossible to know the whole truth because the whole point is the selective suppression of truth, a fair amount of which can be accomplished merely through the selective abandonment of meaning, a rhetorical ploy with which the public has become so resigned that it actually seemed plausible to many that an insufficient enthusiasm for a wholly meaningless concept might constitute a fireable offense, or failing that, some amalgamation of blatant and easily disproved lies will do the trick. It worked, after all, on Elizabeth Warren.

But as Sullivan wrote mere days before her ouster to a Breitbart blogger who had dredged up the hit piece on her seminal bankruptcy study, the history and future and pursuit of knowledge requires numbers to have values and words to have meanings.

Professor Schuchman's principal complaint was really that we did not cite his work frequently enough. We did not cite his numbers because they were generated by egregiously inadequate statistical methods. We did not cite his conclusions because they were unsupported by the data, disproved by the studies, or simply wrong…There were at least fifteen other scholarly reviews of our book, including those in highly reputable journals. Our book was awarded the Silver Gavel award of the American Bar Association. Professor Schuchman's review is, by any standard, an outlier…Scientific misconduct is not simply one more nasty thing you can say about somebody. It is a specific indictment, and must be handled through a regulated process of investigations and conclusion. We undertook that process and were exonerated. There was no scientific misconduct. Anyone who repeats these false allegations is simply indulging in the politics of personal destruction.

Otherwise known as "politics." 

I didn't think they made university presidents like Sullivan anymore. Even in my day, the order of business for an "aspirational" campus like UVA's was pretty much 1. Outsource 2. Build luxury hotel suitable for wooing billionaire donors 3. Spend 22 hrs/day entertaining billionaire donors at fancy events in luxury hotel attended by high-profile politicians/dignitaries similarly desperate to ingratiate selves to billionaire donors. 4. Anthropologie store.

But Sullivan seems to truly understand that the war on climate science and the war on "obscure" subjects like German and  classics is part of a wider war on knowledge many pillars of the higher educational establishment have proven all too eager to collude. (Here, a certain former Harvard president discourages students from bothering to learn a foreign language, parents from putting too much pressure on their kids because "A students tend to become professors and the C students become wealthy donors," and citizens from worrying that regulators have been "co-opted" by the corporations they monitor because knowledge is fundamentally synonymous with corruption.) 

More importantly, the students seem get it too; hell, I didn't think they made a university protest movement that could drag thousands of students back to campus in the middle of the summer, ever. And yet it happened, at the famous "douche" mecca that is Thomas Jefferson's university no less. If it can happen there, Virginia, it could probably even happen at George Mason. But that's a saga that can wait for next week.

Awesome graphics courtesy the Commonwealth Foundation, Moving Virginia Backward.