Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Team Player, Part 1

Two months ago, Dr. Eric Barron, President of Florida State University (FSU), was appointed President of Penn State effective May 12. It seemed an odd choice, since FSU has a mediocre academic reputation and its integrity is tainted by two recent scandals. However, FSU won the NCAA National Football Championship last year, which may suggest what Penn State's #1 priority actually is. New information has recently emerged that raises troubling questions about the university Dr. Barron has spent the last four years governing.

FSU drew the attention of the academic community in 2011, when the Tampa Bay Times revealed that multibillionaire and conservative activist Charles Koch, through the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, had made a $1.5 million donation to the FSU Economics Department in 2008 to be used to hire new faculty for a program promoting “free enterprise.” In exchange, the Foundation's representatives participated in the screening process and were given veto power over new hires for the program. Under this agreement, Koch rejected 60% of the applicants suggested by the faculty, and two new faculty members approved by Koch were hired. When the the agreement become public, it was rejected by the FSU University Senate, but university senates have no power.

Dr. Barron came to FSU in 2010. He responded to the Times story and the Senate's objections by renegotiating the agreement in a way that leaves its consequences largely unchanged. Koch's representatives no longer participate in the screening process, but the Foundation is permitted to withdraw its funding if it objects to the faculty's choices. Since this would leave FSU on the hook for their salaries, it gives them an obvious incentive to hire candidates acceptable to Koch.

It would be naïve to think that academic scholarship is unaffected by political considerations. Government and corporate grants often determine what research topics are investigated and have been shown to exert a subtle influence on research results. The Koch Foundation gives approximately $80 million per year to about 150 universities (including Penn State). However, the FSU arrangement is a particularly egregious violation of the norms of academic freedom. Economics is a highly polarized discipline with clear differences between mainstream and conservative economists. The FSU donation seems to suggest that members of the corporate class can use donations to buy their own version of economic “knowledge.” It's not surprising that they would try to do this, but disappointing that a state-owned university would allow it to happen.

The Koch-FSU controversy takes on an additional twist given that Dr. Barron is a climate scientist, while the Koch brothers, deeply involved in oil and gas production, have used their wealth to secretly promote climate change denial. The FSU Economics Department uses an introductory textbook, Economics: Private and Public Choices, by James W. Gwartney, et al. Dr. Gwartney is an FSU faculty member, and two of his three co-authors were formerly affiliated with the university. Dr. Yoram Bauman, an economist with the Sightline Institute, has given the textbook a failing grade for misrepresenting the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other climate research. It is rated second worst on this issue of 18 popular introductory economics texts.

No one is accusing Dr. Barron of being a climate change denier. Between 1986 and 2006, while he was director of the Earth System Science Center and later Dean of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences at Penn State, he recruited Drs. Richard Alley and Michael Mann, two distinguished climate scientists. Dr. Barron's views of climate science can be heard about 21 minutes into this interview. He appears to be a climate moderate concerned with predicting the future effects of climate change but emphasizing the scientific uncertainty about what these effects will be.


When Dr. Barron reports to State College for work next month, one of his first orders of business should be to explain how he intends to ensure that the Koch Foundation's Penn State donations do not influence research and teaching at the university.


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