Academic Politics
Q: Why are academic politics so savage?
A: Because the stakes are so low.
I'm reminded of that joke (told to me by a tenured journalism prof) upon reading this bit of melodrama in the Washington Post.
It seems a young graduate student at Oregon State University had a paper accepted by the esteemed journal Science, an accomplishment you might reasonably expect would be celebrated his peers. Instead, professors from the same university actually tried to stop the peer-reviewed study from seeing publication.
Why? Apparently Daniel Donato's study had the audacity to question the assumption that so-called salvage logging helps "restore" forests as well as the "scientific rationale behind a bill pending in Congress that would ease procedures for post-fire logging in federal forests." As such, his conclusions ran counter to other timber-industry-financed scholarship at OSU.
Ultimately, the study was in fact published and shortly thereafter the forest industry freaked out as did the Bureau of Land Management and the bill's sponsors in Congress. The latter hauled Donato before a hearing of the House subcommittee on forests and forest health and publicly dressed him down. According to the Post's report, Rep. Brian Baird even charged Donato with "a long list of professional failings and character flaws, including 'deliberate bias,' lack of humility and ignorance of statistical theory."
After the public excoriation, however, The University of Washington's Jerry Franklin, an eminence in forest ecology, delivered a summation of the science on the subject that cast Donato's work in a more respectable light.
A: Because the stakes are so low.
I'm reminded of that joke (told to me by a tenured journalism prof) upon reading this bit of melodrama in the Washington Post.
It seems a young graduate student at Oregon State University had a paper accepted by the esteemed journal Science, an accomplishment you might reasonably expect would be celebrated his peers. Instead, professors from the same university actually tried to stop the peer-reviewed study from seeing publication.
Why? Apparently Daniel Donato's study had the audacity to question the assumption that so-called salvage logging helps "restore" forests as well as the "scientific rationale behind a bill pending in Congress that would ease procedures for post-fire logging in federal forests." As such, his conclusions ran counter to other timber-industry-financed scholarship at OSU.
Ultimately, the study was in fact published and shortly thereafter the forest industry freaked out as did the Bureau of Land Management and the bill's sponsors in Congress. The latter hauled Donato before a hearing of the House subcommittee on forests and forest health and publicly dressed him down. According to the Post's report, Rep. Brian Baird even charged Donato with "a long list of professional failings and character flaws, including 'deliberate bias,' lack of humility and ignorance of statistical theory."
After the public excoriation, however, The University of Washington's Jerry Franklin, an eminence in forest ecology, delivered a summation of the science on the subject that cast Donato's work in a more respectable light.
Salvage logging and replanting can often succeed, Franklin said, if the intent is to turn a scorched landscape into a stand of trees for commercial harvest.
If, however, Congress wants to promote the ecologically sound recovery of burned federal forests, Franklin said, the overwhelming weight of scientific research suggests that "salvage logging is not going to be appropriate."
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