Bjorn Lomborg is much less wild-eyed than his reputation suggests.
The Danish researcher who made waves with The Skeptical Environmentalist in 2001 was mainstream enough to be featured on the Freakonomics podcast last year talking about the best return on investment for development aid – the mission of his Copenhagen Consensus Center.
He was a f—ing TED conference speaker, for f—ity f—‘s sake.
Lomborg is all about ROI, whether it’s dealing with environmental damage or spending on the global poor. Yet anything he touches is apparently too much for the University of Western Australia.
The school just backtracked on a federally funded research center affiliated with Lomborg’s organization, because it was bullied by Lomborg-haters, Inside Higher Ed reports:
Politicians on Australia’s liberal wing, staff members at the university and academics at other Australian institutions joined the fray. More than 6,000 people signed a Change.org petition seeking to “turn away Bjorn Lomborg’s anti-climate science institute funding.”
Vice Chancellor Paul Johnson wrote that he still defends Lomborg’s work, but the planned center “lacks the support needed across the university and the broader academic community to meet its contractual obligations and deliver value for money for Australian taxpayers.”
So basically, you can only do research if it’s popular within your own narrow cocoon of academics? That’s quite the “free speech, but” variant.
Johnson dug himself in a bigger hole in an interview:
“[Many academics believe that] working with the Copenhagen Consensus Center raises issues of academic integrity, so we are not prepared to work with it. That I suppose you might say is an issue of academic freedom.”
No, that’s a heckler’s veto by thumb-sucking sheltered toddlers, you wanker.
Australia’s government, oddly enough, supports the right to conduct research deemed controversial more than its university system.
Its human rights commissioner publicly excoriated the university for backing out, saying Lomborg’s critics want to “target people who don’t fit accepted progressive groupthink,” and its education minister promised the Australian Consensus Centre would find a home elsewhere: “Freedom of speech demands that it does.”
It’s quite the accomplishment to make American public universities, full of intolerant leftist groupthink partisans who think words are “violence,” look good by comparison.
Greg Piper is an associate editor at The College Fix. (@GregPiper)
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IMAGE: Lomborg.com
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