Quote:
Originally Posted by Blueblaze
Yes, no doubt, that was not the single incident that caused my son-in-law to lose tenure. He is a very sober and intelligent man, and I imagine there were other incidents where he attempted to inject logic into the religious arguments over the causes of so-called "climate change".
But there is a somewhat happy ending to the story. He was not fired -- which is very unusual in cases such as this. His students started a letter-writing campaign and a congressman stepped in. But I suspect the greater influence was the millions of dollars his grants bring into the university. And here's the ironic twist. Those grants are to study how grazing grasses can be selected or modified to make them more resilient to the droughts in many places of the world that have occurred as a result the recent warming trend (in particular, the pampas of South America where we get most of our beef these days).
Unlike the religious zealots who argue over silly solutions for the weather 100 years from now, he's working to come up with solutions for the immediate climate problems of today.
But it still wasn't enough to save his tenure. The University is still free to fire him at a whim, which I'm sure they will do when his current projects are finished and the public eye is elsewhere. Such is the state of "free speech" on our nation's campuses.
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Well, I, for one, wish him every success. But always remember that the immediate climate problems of today took a lot of clever people a long time to create. I think that whatever we can reasonably do is going to take awhile. So, the sooner we begin, the better.