BY HANK REICHMAN President Donald Trump has said many, many moronic things, but his tweet this weekend about the raging wildfires in California must be one of his dumbest. “California wildfires are being magnified & made so much worse by the bad environmental laws which aren’t allowing massive amount of readily available water to be…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today the AAUP released a new report, “National Security, the Assault on Science, and Academic Freedom.” The report details troubling threats to academic freedom in the physical and natural sciences that have been exacerbated by the Trump administration’s hostility to science. International scientific exchange and, especially, the charging of innocent Chinese or…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In a short piece for the New Yorker, Daniel A. Gross quotes extensively from a prisoner’s account of what it has been like to experience Harvey from inside a maximum-security cell in a prison in the severely affected region of Texas. Here are the opening paragraphs that provide a context for…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The New York Times Editorial Board has published a lengthy editorial on the Trump administration’s persistent efforts to deny scientific consensus and to place in positions of power people who share that disdain for scientific truths that conflict with narrow corporate interests and Far-Right ideological talking points. The editorial begins by…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Poetry has been defined as the effort to express the inexpressible. In the context of the flooding caused by Hurricane Harvey, I think that much the same can be said for many disciplines, ranging from statistics to engineering. Consider the following numbers: Estimated volume of rainwater from Harvey that has…
BY LUIS I. PRÁDANOS Every time I mention the obvious in a classroom—that most industrial economic activities deplete energy and materials and, therefore, constant economic growth in the context of a limited biosphere is a biophysical impossibility—I am moved by some students’ honest reactions. Their response will be some variation of “That makes sense. Why did nobody tell us before that as the global economy grows, the living systems of…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL On June 1, President Trump announced that he was taking the United States out of the Paris Climate Accord, making the U.S., Syria, and Nicaragua (which felt the deal was not sufficiently ambitious), the only nations not to support the agreement. The Paris Agreement sets a series of goals and is…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Late last year I posted a piece about climate scientist and AAUP Committee A member Michael Mann’s important victory in his ongoing libel suit. The District of Columbia Court of Appeals ruled in a 111-page opinion that Mann can sue two conservative writers over allegations that they defamed him. The case centers on…
BY STEVE MUMME The author of this guest post is Steve Mumme, Co-President of the Colorado Conference of AAUP. One week into Donald Trump’s presidency it is clear that the new administration intends the harshest attack on American universities since the McCarthy Era. Enamored of Alt-Facts and an unhealthy skepticism of science itself, the new administration has…