Climategate Was an Academic Disaster Waiting to Happen

Wall Street Journal ^ | MARCH 13, 2010 | PETER BERKOWITZ

[neverdem]

The notion of objective truth has been abandoned and the peer review process gives scholars ample opportunity to reward friends and punish enemies.

Last fall, emails revealed that scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England and colleagues in the U.S. and around the globe deliberately distorted data to support dire global warming scenarios and sought to block scholars with a different view from getting published. What does this scandal say generally about the intellectual habits and norms at our universities?

This is a legitimate question, because our universities, which above all should be cultivating intellectual virtue, are in their day-to-day operations fostering the opposite. Fashionable ideas, the convenience of professors, and the bureaucratic structures of academic life combine to encourage students and faculty alike to defend arguments for which they lack vital information. They pretend to knowledge they don't possess and invoke the authority of rank and status instead of reasoned debate.

Consider the undergraduate curriculum. Over the last several decades, departments have watered down the requirements needed to complete a major, while core curricula have been hollowed out or abandoned. Only a handful of the nation's leading universities—Columbia and the University of Chicago at the forefront—insist that all undergraduates must read a common set of books and become conversant with the main ideas and events that shaped Western history and the larger world.

There are no good pedagogical reasons for abandoning the core. Professors and administrators argue that students need and deserve the freedom to shape their own course of study. But how can students who do not know the basics make intelligent decisions about the books they should read and the perspectives they should master?

The real reasons for releasing students from rigorous departmental requirements and fixed core courses are...

[Gene Eric]

Grants, grants, grants, and more grants.

[FlingWingFlyer]

"The Truth Is Out There"

These criminals in the "global warming" movement were going to get caught sooner or later. It's just a good thing that they were exposed before they could do any further damage to our lives, our country, our jobs and our economy.

[umgud]

Climategate Was an Academic Economic Disaster Waiting to Happen

[DB]

Bump for later read.

[Niuhuru]

It was the result of politicans taking the celebrities seriously.

[mrreaganaut]

It’s all true, and nobody cares. It’s never us, or our children who should work for achievement, it’s all those other boobs. I’ve sadly come to agree with Democrat Garrison Keillor: America is Lake Wobegon, “Where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” And it’s politically incorrect to say otherwise.

[cranked]

Not only that, it should how faulty the academic peer-review system is....it amounts to and/or equates to a ‘buddy system’.

[Carry_Okie]

For all the BS leftists offer about "equality," a university is the most stratified place on the planet. Just look at the arrangement of parking places, with dedicated stalls for every level of the hierarchy, from president, to faculty, to car-pools, to zero emissions vehicles...

It's insane.

[nathanbedford]

I am just now reading "The Education of Henry Adams" for the first time. Published in 1904, it has been proclaimed the greatest book of the century. Hyperbolic as that might be, it is clear that the ills complained of by Adams respecting our educational establishment have only metastasized over the succeeding century.

If our educational institutions fail us, ultimately our culture, our civilization, and our Republican experiment fails.

When I went to school 50 years ago it was considered necessary for students to come together almost in the style of a medieval cloister to rub elbows and sit at the knees of scholars. The intimacy was thought to be indispensable hence the necessity for a "place" of learning, an assumption that goes back to the Middle Ages and even into Greece. Perhaps the Times they are a changing and technology will succeed in reforming an institution which is becoming as stratified as it was in the Middle Ages. There is really no need now to go to a classroom to hear a canned lecture when it is or should be available to all on the Internet, as MIT has done with its curriculum. TTC has put innumerable lectures on audio and videotape in virtually every discipline. There is no need to cloister among the vines of Ivy to see or hear them. Peer review is as easily accomplished through the Internet as by the distribution of mimeograph as was done in my day.

Yes, the times they are a changing and the guild system of our universities must somehow give way.

[eyedigress]

The intimacy was thought to be indispensable hence the necessity for a "place" of learning, an assumption that goes back to the Middle Ages and even into Greece. Perhaps the Times they are a changing and technology will succeed in reforming an institution which is becoming as stratified as it was in the Middle Ages.

My life in south Knox county was understanding placement and smarts. The first grade met it's first genius.

[eyedigress]

BTW it wasn’t me.

[steelyourfaith]

 

Beam me to Planet Gore !

[Senator John Blutarski]

What you describe is certainly a praiseworthy path toward “democratization” and expansion of educational opportunities (although our society seems to place far more value upon certifications and diplomas than actual mastery).

I will comment however that IMHO ingestion is only one part of a proper education. Discussion and debate with mentors and peers represent an essential and necessary second component to reach true mastery of a subject.

Strictly my opinion, of course.

[nathanbedford]

I fully agree with you. In fact, I tell my kids that college is a place where you have to go away to for four years in order to be affected by the atmosphere. The problem is the academics have so structured their system that they prosper not by teaching and mentoring but by publishing and so the practice falls far short of the ideal theory.

Interestingly, it seems that it is not just a "place" that a university makes but the students should be of a certain age. I observed many veterans who were two or three years older than the rest of the students who simply were more mature and regarded the ivory tower from a wholly different perspective. They wanted the body of knowledge and they wanted to get on with it but they did not need the interaction with the other students. Military service had made men of them and often the academic institutions frustrated them because they sometimes work in the opposite direction.

I do not understand why professors should deliver canned lectures live year after year and students should be required to sit there when they could just as easily take it down off their computer in their dorms or at home. If that were done more then there would be more time for the professors to conduct small seminars and mentor.

I am not sure but it occurs to me that a great deal of the structure of the modern university system in which professors are far removed from students and virtually all interaction occurs between postgraduates and students, is somehow encouraged by the insinuation of federal money into the picture. I do not know but I suspect that federal grants are allocated based on criteria such as whether the applicant has published etc. If federal money cannot be taken out of the system altogether, at least let us strive to incentivize teaching rather than research into bizarre left-wing hobbyhorses.

.

[Carry_Okie]

There is no need to cloister among the vines of Ivy to see or hear them. Peer review is as easily accomplished through the Internet as by the distribution of mimeograph as was done in my day.

Correct. Instruction is free with the caveat that the greatest of teachers should be as rich as rock stars. The key is now credentialing. That comes down to grading papers. Build test centers in strip malls and ship the grading to Bangalore. Shut down the entire K-bachelor degree system for all but post graduate work. I'm tired of paying for a destructive baby-sitting service.

[JustDoItAlways]

If you are reading academic research papers on climate science, make sure you just go through the base data behind it/contained in it.

In most of them, you’ll find that the abstract and most of the paper is strongly supporting AGW but the base data and the evidence supplied with the paper, totally contradicts the abstract and AGW in general.

I think there is still a large percentage of climate researchers who understand the field is strongly exaggerated and they are supplying base data to question it. But to keep their jobs and get their paper published and keep their grant funding, they have to write it up as though it were pro-AGW when they are really just supplying better data to other doubtful researchers so that some day in the future this problem can be fixed.

It is the only reason that explains why the data behind 80% of climate papers does not support what the paper says. Either that or the field is dominated by scientists who are bad with numbers and math. The ones that are strong in math and science in general stay with Math and Physics and Astrophysics etc. while the students who don’t really understand math in general migrate to the Environmental Sciences like Climate Science.

[_Jim]

Hear hear!

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[BIGLOOK]

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