University should focus on research transparency, not donors, climate change expert says
Brown University rejected petitions to ban oil and gas funded research, opting instead for transparency in donations to the school.
President Christina Paxson announced “the University will include in its Annual Financial Report a full list of organizations that have supported Brown research in the previous academic year, beginning in November 2025.”
The president of the Providence university released a five-page letter to the Advisory Committee on University Resources Management. The list of donors will not include “the identities of funded researchers or amounts of awards.” The changes follow demands by a campus group seeking to restriction donations from oil and gas companies.
An activist group called Sunrise Brown called for a ban on oil and gas funded research at the university along with other alternatives meant to squelch the influence of “fossil fuel companies.” The group released a report in 2023 called “Dissociate Now.”
The university “received more than $20 million from foundations associated with the fossil fuel industry and foundations that have contributed more than $35 million to climate denial groups,” the group alleged in its report.
The transparency decision is an effort to “allay concerns that Brown is accepting research grants from organizations that are not aligned with University policy,” Paxson (pictured) wrote.
The advisory committee recommended against a funding ban. It also declined to prohibit recruiting by oil and gas companies at job fairs and through other venues at Brown.
President Paxson said she is open to the idea of the university mentoring professors about the risks of accepting corporate funding, but said concerns apply “for research of any type that is sponsored by corporations that may have a financial interest in the results of research, for example, companies in the pharmaceutical or biomedical device industries.”
Sunrise Brown did not respond to two emailed requests for comment in the past month from The College Fix about next steps for its activism. ACURM, the advisory committee, also did not respond to requests about the implementation of the report.
However, a researcher who oversees climate publications for the Heartland Institute said transparency in the studies themselves, not funding, is more important.
Sterling Burnett, the director of the Heartland Institute’s Center on Climate and Environmental Policy, says that “it is critical to academic freedom, to ensure researchers are not harassed, that the university not disclose which particular scholar or department has received grants from what have become politically controversial institutions.”
“Such disclosure should be up to the grant maker, and the researcher(s), themselves,” he said.
He said further:
If Brown wants to ensure and publicize the quality of its research, rather than focusing on who or what entity gives the money (focusing on the who rather than the argument or results is a logical fallacy), it should require in the contract that the results of any research produced be open to testing and scrutiny, with the grant maker not being allowed to suppress any unfavorable findings.
Burnett said “if fossil fuel company grants and donations must be publicly identified, grants from all such public and private organizations should be equally revealed. Transparency for one, transparency for all.”
Both the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and the American Conservation Coalition declined to comment.
The Fix asked FIRE for comment on how to balance privacy and transparency of donors and about academic freedom.
The American Conservation Coalition declined to answer the same questions, saying it was “outside” its “purview.”
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IMAGE: Brown University
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