Trump admin gives voices to scholars once silenced on climate change, COVID
President Donald Trump’s administration has taken a lot of heat for cutting university grants for scientific research. But less noticed has been the ways his administration is actually opening the doors to more unorthodox scholarship — and academic freedom.
Scholars whose views do not always align with the prevailing ideas on issues like climate change, gender, and COVID are now playing important roles in the government’s actions on these matters.
Major news outlets like the New York Times have treated Trump’s actions with skepticism, but the changes signal new hope for academic freedom and honesty.
One of the most recent examples is a report by the U.S. Department of Energy, published at the end of July, regarding climate change policy.
A New York Times report summed up the document this way: “Sea level rise is not accelerating. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be good for plant growth. The computer models used to predict global warming tend to exaggerate future temperature increases.”
The Environmental Protection Agency cited the report recently “in its proposal to repeal a landmark 2009 finding that greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, pose a threat to public health,” according to the NYT.
The article’s headline suggested the document is an attack on “science” by “climate skeptics” — and real “scientists” found “errors” with it. The newspaper quoted two:
Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth and the payments company Stripe, called the document a “scattershot collection of oft-debunked skeptic claims” that “are not representative of broader climate science research findings.” …
“It is a coordinated, full-scale attack on the science,” said Dave White, who directs the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation at Arizona State University. “This was present in the first Trump administration, but it’s being exacerbated in the second.”
Reading on, however, the report revealed that the authors (“skeptics”) are actually distinguished scholars at major universities. Interestingly, the report names the scholars but not their institutions (it does the scholars who criticized their research, though).
One author is Steven Koonin, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and former NYU professor. Another is a distinguished professor at the University of Alabama, and a third author is a professor emerita of Georgia Tech.
These are not obscure scholars and certainly not quacks. But research like theirs has been met with skepticism and censure for years.
At a University of Southern California conference in January, Koonin recounted the many professors who have been canceled for “simply displaying data” that disputed catastrophic climate change predictions, The College Fix reported at the time.
That appears to be changing under the new presidential administration.
Similar is the case of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.
The Stanford physician and epidemiologist faced harassment and censorship after he spoke out against the government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now, Bhattacharya is leading the National Institutes of Health under Trump.
Meanwhile, academics who recognize that men and women are different and that humans can’t change their gender also have more freedom to speak – and hopefully opportunities to receive grant funding – since the new administration adopted these realities as fact.
There’s more hope, too, that these changes could help shed light on whether these scholars’ positions are actually unorthodox or simply that cancel culture has led to the silencing of a quiet majority.
Sure, Trump is cutting scientific research grants — although many arguably have a political, rather than scientific, aim. But the administration also is elevating scientific views that add to the debate about important issues like our environment and health care. And that’s something that should be celebrated.
MORE: Poll finds professors self-censor writing to avoid controversy
IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: Fadziel Nor/Shutterstock
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