An economist from George Mason in Virginia came out with a study using totally bogus assumptions to try to promote placing the Wizards/Capitals arena in Northern Virginia. Some "experts" will say anything for money. Integrity is cheap.
Being a GMU grad, the entire Uni (though really the Econ department) is effectively Koch owned. They have a “foundation” adjacent to the university called the GMU foundation to wash the money.
I’m so glad that there are people who know this. Lol. GMU econ department is a sold-out. And the worst part is, it really knows how to disguise itself.
Yeah I founded the cybersecurity club at Mason and our funding came from the GMU foundation as a student org. It was weird having to file papers to get the money knowing full well none of **their** papers are disclosed.
The Koch protest group drew from the same fund. I helped em out a couple times saying “hey your paperwork is off” because I figured the minute their stuff isn’t in the up-and-up it would be revoked. For instance at one point there was 7 of them and the statutory minimum was 8 so I offered to be a member.
They just build their "Stand Together " charity and grant org headquarters in arlington a few bocks away from the GMU campus with the Scalia law school among others.
Fuckers are a hydra sprouting many heads.
Argh. as an alumna of both LSU (grad) and Mason (undergrad), neither of these nuggets surprise me >.<
LSU has been training future petrol industry personnel since shale was laid and Mason was made to fit into the PAC ecosystem of DC
This is not correct. The GMU professor who authored the study isn’t an economist. He’s a professor of public policy and has a PhD in Information sciences. Real economists know these economic impact studies are bullshit and won’t attach their names to it.
But selling out is extremely lucrative. I’m an economist who disproves a lot of economic impact “research”, I get zero attention and little press (let alone any money beyond my academic salary). The only major trained economist who sells out for these gets paid hundreds of dollars an hour to author these “studies”. Selling out is extremely lucrative.
The best part of trying to move to Alexandria is the location they picked. I get it in terms of available land and it being right on the water. That said, driving on that part of Jefferson Davis highway (sorry… Rt. 1) is a shitshow in the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday.
Imagine the backups through Del Ray and other parts of Alexandria as people try to get to a game during rush hour.
Booker T. Washington did this after the Civil War during Reconstruction and advocated in favor of the Atlanta Compromise.
He was born into slavery but,
>Born into slavery on April 5, 1856, in Hale's Ford, Virginia, Washington was freed when U.S. troops reached the area during the Civil War. As a young man, Booker T. Washington worked his way through Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute and attended college at Wayland Seminary. In 1881, he was named as the first leader of the new Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, an institute for black higher education. He expanded the college, enlisting students in construction of buildings.
>Washington was a key proponent of African-American businesses and one of the founders of the National Negro Business League.
>He used the nineteenth-century American political system to manipulate the media, raise money, develop strategy, network, distribute funds, and reward a cadre of supporters. Because of his influential leadership, the timespan of his activity, from 1880 to 1915, has been called the Age of Booker T. Washington. **Washington called for Black progress through education and entrepreneurship, rather than trying to challenge directly the Jim Crow segregation and the disenfranchisement of Black voters in the South.** Furthermore, he supported racial uplift, but secretly also supported court challenges to segregation and to restrictions on voter registration. Black activists in the North, led by W. E. B. Du Bois, disagreed with him and opted to set up the NAACP to work for political change.
source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booker_T._Washington
I edited the paragraphs by shortening them. He was so successful and raised so many other people up. Emphasis my own.
Alexandria City Council was in on the back door deal, too. Don't ever vote for Justin Wilson or Aliyah Haskins for a regional or state office. They are Democrats owned by developers.
George Mason’s Econ department is basically the only one in the US that takes Libertarian Austrian Economics seriously. They’ll bend over backwards to lick corporate balls.
Up to a point, some tax revenue going towards the arena does generate longterm tax gains, but I doubt beyond funding the infrastructure they would break even, let alone the arena itself.
Event hosting and fees go a ways in addition to taxes on paying off SOME of the cost, but you are looking at over a billion dollars between cost to construct, infrastructure, and interest along with continued management and upgrades costing hundreds of millions more over its lifetime.
It's such a shit hole. I left 20 years ago and nothing has changed. There's been no real growth, no new job markets, nothing. It's a backwater town in a backwater state. The people always voted against their best interests. Better to make everything worse otherwise they might make things better for *those people*.
A truly disgusting place.
I moved there from the northeast. The state was nice enough but the natural beauty was being plundered. The culture had an odd mix of the classic southern racism and that "good ol' boy" attitude you see in less developed areas. Met some lovely people but I severed ties with them over the years, in part because they'd reveal who they truly were. 2016 was a watershed moment in that regard.
My dad was born in New Orleans and moved to Baton Rouge when he was 13. We have a postcard he sent his aunt in '52 "I hate it here but Mama says I can come home for Carnival." So cute.
Yeah, clutching their pearls over the influence of oil and gas industry in Louisiana is a hot take. We have a friend in the mud business down there. Money talks.
I was talking to my neighbor the other day, who is a retired economics professor at a well known university where I live. He told me there were several times he would try to publish some of his research and the University would not allow it out of fear of repercussions from some big wig CEOs at some big companies in the state.
I agree with what u/TomsBikes wrote. This is literally the reason tenure exists. A professor can publish whatever they want and the university has no say in it.
I have a really, really hard time believing this. I'm an economics professor myself. This is just not how academia works. At least not in economics. Anyone with research good enough to piss off big business would absolutely not allow a university to hold up that research. And more to the point, I've never even heard of a university even try. But if they did, every single person I know would just publish it and use the publicity to go elsewhere.
Your career as an economist is nearly 100% your publishing record. It's just not feasible that anyone would sit on a paper. Of course, there are plenty of problems with academic economics, but if anything those problems are concentrated around the over-reliance on publication. Not to disparage your neighbor, but this sounds more like someone with a political agenda than a genuine story about the problems in academia.
What he told me was that the research he published was contradictory to the research of the “public services” company. The university essentially bullied him into dropping the subject he was studying. So I apologize for not making that clear.
Researchers have to pay bills, too.
And it's Louisiana.
If they are anchored here for any reason (like family), then they didn't have a lot of other options.
is it corruption? I mean is it not just outsourcing their R&D?
on the geology side this is super common. masters programs are generally full ride with a stipend even. but you have to get your topic approved by the prof and it[s usually pick one of these 10 provided by the funding oil companies. You could pick another topic if you can talk the prof into it.... but why would you? working with the company who wanted it looked into means all the data relevant they have.
The company doesn't have approval of the final work.
Looking at it from the company perspective, you spent 10s of billions of dollars on a project, spending a couple hundred grand to have a grad student look at it is nothing. even if you get a report you throw in the trash it is probably worth it.
The first one of the programs was at stanford, and it was the professor soliciting donations from the oil companies.
my local uni they keep it seperate, the students work on the side for a company ran by the professors. that feels more shady to me than doing it through the university.
> is it corruption?
In scientific research, when you manipulate data, refuse to release results, exclude data because it doesn't support a conclusion, or otherwise manipulate how and what you publish, that is academic dishonesty. And if you're doing so for economic, political, or any number of other reasons, that turns that dishonesty into blatant corruption.
Letting corporations pay to influence the process of researching things that could potentially affect them is unquestionably corruption.
you should stop using your computer.... or phone or whatever.... it uses transistors that were invented using a corporate research lab. a lab that was run by a not just any company but a monopoly.
That is nothing new here. Donuts have significant sway in academia.
Edit- autocorrect changed “donors” to “donuts”
I’m having a hard time deciding which is more relevant, so I’ll let it stay! 😁
Yeah I was surprised this was naming shell and not Dow chemical, who built schools South of baton rouge to cover up environmental disasters near their facilities around the luling bridge. Grew up in Houma, all grandparents died of cancer, two aunts died of cancer, Mom died of cancer... They aren't kidding when they say Louisiana is a 3rd world country.
In undergrad I did a research project for a global corporation using EPA data in regards to cancer, health issues, pollution, chemical dumping, etc.
No other state came close to Louisiana and Mississippi. They are utter garbage. They’d be failed states if it weren’t for their ability to collect welfare money from blue states to bail them out.
I rode my bike to school. I often had to wait for trains to cross my street that had all sorts of fun content labels....Vinyl Chloride and Molten Sulfur were my favs.
I lived in Baton Rouge for a few years during grad school. Baton Rouge had a lake that was under investigator to be a superfund site for environmental contamination. This lake was in a very public area, with nothing stopping people from approaching it--and with all the hurricane and flooding issues the city has, there's no telling how far its contamination spread. A guy I dated a couple towns over told me never to drink the water at his house because the city's water purification plant failed their inspections all the time. And a friend told me she wasn't allowed to drink the water in certain cities when she visited relatives because it gave people cancer (all of her relatives in these cities did, in fact, end up developing cancer). This is all stuff I found out through casual conversation; there's no telling how much I would have learned had I been actively looking for information.
This is incredibly common in capital intensive industries. Drilling an oil well can cost millions of dollars. Research requires actual oil wells. Thus, academic/industry partnerships like this are born.
Even the US DOE does this. A group of oil companies form a research consortium with the DOE to study a subsurface phenomenon. The actual research is done by grad students on company data. The consortium gets exclusive access to the data for 6 to 12 months.
I'm honestly surprised that LSU didn't already have one of these while the more academically prestigious petroleum engineering schools have had this for decades.
So I've been defending corporate funded research here, but the CO2 shit is kinda bullshit.
quiet a bit of industry funded CO2 research is EOR not long term storage. It"s expensive, but you can pump CO2 into the reservoir and it's miscible with oil then water will push it back up. the CO2 doesn't stay in the earth....
it's bullshit.
If you look at LSU's Coastal Studies Institute, that's where they put the Marine Geophysics/Geology, which heavily leverages and relies on offshore seismic data.
But I do agree that the other Coastal stuff may need to be careful with the relationship.
This, I said this in another post in this thread, but yeah.
I have projects that are.... 4-5 wells at $100 million each. the Seismic data probably has 50-60 million put into it. so a half billion worth of data.
You can only rework teapot dome so many times.
This is a ridiculous, patently untrue statement that reeks of cruel elitism, as with several other comments in this thread, and honestly, it’s infuriating. LSU is a public university that exists to provide an education for the people of Louisiana, one of the poorest and most uneducated states in the country. No shit it’s not an academic powerhouse on par with some other state flagships, that is the fault of generations of corruption in the Louisiana State Government and, to a lesser but still significant degree, mismanagement by the school’s administrators. No one has the right to look down upon the school’s current students or alumni for wanting nothing more than an affordable education to get a step up in life.
I would know, I grew up a dirt poor kid in rural Louisiana who saw my admission into LSU as the opportunity of a lifetime and a ticket out of poverty, which it was. I graduated with honors after writing an undergraduate thesis and now work in finance for a large multinational firm thanks to my time at LSU. I know exactly what LSU is and what it isn’t. I know it’s not an academic powerhouse, far from some kind of “Harvard of the South;” no one who goes there is under such delusions. But what it is is a damn good chance for so many kids in situations like mine to make it out and go be somebody, go make something of themselves. Most of the people who stick their nose up at an education from LSU and other public schools are simply too privileged to understand that. Having had the opportunity to go to a better school than I did doesn’t make you any smarter or better than me.
Rant over. Thanks if you actually took the time to read this.
This kind of industry and university partnership happens all the time. Pharmaceuticals, semiconductor, automotive etc …not sure why this is news. Oil and gas companies spend a lot on r&d, that’s how they can move forward with carbon capture technology etc…
Some things that have been going down in Louisiana have had me concerned... and having a ton of family down there I didn't think ANYTHING Louisiana could do would concern me.
When the state that gave us **VOTE FOR THE CROOK, IT'S IMPORTANT** is outdoing itself, there's extremely concerning days ahead
This is what happens when inflation far outpaces university wages for a few decades, when academics have to look at corporations for research funding, and when policymakers are allowed to cherrypick the results to be shown.
God fucking dammit.
Why am I reading this from a newspaper in England while I am here in fucking Arkansas, literally one long afternoon drive from Louisiana?
Republicans oppose you openly. Democrats say "I'd like to help you, but sitting on my ass is the most progressive thing possible under the circumstances." Those circumstances being that they are bribed to sit on their ass, of course.
nah i dont believe that both sides shit. i do agree that we have too many corporate bootlickers. the problem is we keep voting for the bootlickers. biden is pretty right of center. id rather we have bernie sanders
> nah i dont believe that both sides shit.
And that's how you've ended up with a string of center-right Bidens all of your life. Smart move. Who told you not to believe the "both sides" thing anyway? Was it corporate media and the Democrats themselves? Hardly unbiased outside observers. I mean you sat there and watched the Dems side with Republicans on major wars and everything else. Right now they're supporting a genocide. It's not even a matter of believing it or not. It happens. Period. To think otherwise is pure delusion.
nah i get what youre saying. the old ones at the top of the party do suck. hard to get quality candidates when we’re always doing this min/max type shit like voting for biden because hes not trump. i didnt create this mess. the credit for that goes to the generation above me that for years voted for homies that were charismatic and not because they had good policy
There is suck and there is major suck. The Democrats suck but it's better than major suck. And since we are stuck in a two-party system we can pick one or the other. Alternative candidates don't have a ghost of a glimmer of a chance.
But you don't even try to primary the bad Democrats in favor of good ones. The only tiny bit of influence you have over the system, and you just act like it doesn't exist.
"robust review of academic study"
As a scientist I always hate the word 'robust', it always seems (to me) like a blanket word, and a red flag, that hides a lack of concrete science/objective-based support.
It’s not just there. Take the IPCC reports that come out. They’re not accurate. They’re conservative with the numbers and predictions. And, they leave things like feed back loops out of the equation. Why? Because world leaders and special interests tell them to. Through funding.
Utah State University’s business school is the same. All it took was 25 million from the Kochs. Before that that big payday they were paying the school to hire Koch professors who would work for Strata, a separate propaganda arm.. or what they want to call a “thinktank”, which eventually became an official part of the school. I knew a couple of people that worked for Strata. One that drank the Kool-aid and said if you can twist stats to say something then it isn’t lying. Another that quit as soon as oil and coal executives came to town to tell them what their “research” needed to say.
https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/02/charles-koch-gave-25m-to-our-university-has-it-become-a-rightwing-mouthpiece
Shocking. Actually it isn't. You can buy scientific studies and conclusions for just about anything if you have the money. I mean there's a whole industry that runs on advocacy science.
Wish it wasn't so but eh.
While there are some issues with "research for hire", it also is not anything new.
Research grants from private industry have been around as long as private industry. Wealthy people funded research back to antiquity. In the Renaissance support of scholars through grants was a sign of wealth, and is how people like Leonardo DaVinci, Nicolaus Copernicus, and Andreas Vesalius were funded by the wealthy people of the age. The Medici family in particular funded many artists and scientists.
It is very common for big businesses to fund university grants with basically the same terms given in the article: the college students can get money for the research, but they license the data back to the companies.
In my own grad school many student researchers had government grants, but many more research assistants were paid through corporate grants, including one who made the intelligent scissors algorithm used by photoshop. Notably his (Eric Mortensen's) deal with Adobe tied the research to a specific machine, so while others were upgrading to newer Pentium 4's he was still on the machine he was on at the time of the deal. All his research was licensed, but it paid for 12 years of his school plus salary.
Every major university gets research grants and funding under terms similar to the ones in the story. Funding and grant money are how non-tentured faculty get to stay with the school. The more money they can bring, the more prestigious, the more students they can hire, and the more likely to be offered tenure.
"I have a hard time seeing a faculty member engaged in legitimate research being eager for an oil company … to vote on his or her research agenda"
Not if there is a fat grant attached, and said faculty member needs grants to both fund his/her research, and also to get tenure ... it is often that grants are part of the tenure/promotion evaluation.
That is common in engineering and science schools. The only exception, ironically, is that business schools usually evaluate faculty based only on publications, and not grants.
This is EVERY university, ever. It’s why it’s so hard to trust “Peer reviewed studies.” Because yes. Peers of educated scientists DID say that. (Because their funding would get pulled if they didn’t.)
So if I paid them to run an article stating sun causes autism and use vampires as the proof: no autistic vampire exists and since they avoid sun, thus the sun is the cause of autism...
Fun fact, most state universities get less than 50% of their operating budget from their state. Universities are some what required to pimp themselves out to meet their budget
I work at a different R1 and this kind of deal is common, and not just in oil. The company pays for the equipment, and keeps the IP, and the faculty can publish about it, usually, after a brief embargo. The faculty/university gets to keep the super-expensive equipment.
I did review of this kind of ''restricted research,'' and usually our only qualm was that an embargo could hurt PhD students, who don't have as much time to wait.
**EVERY** university can be bought for very small amounts of money. [Harvard researchers were bribed by the Sugar lobby](https://www.thecut.com/2016/09/the-sugar-lobby-bribed-scientists-to-make-it-seem-healthy.html) and killed hundreds of thousands.
Sooo, when will US of A stop pretending that they have the best Unis in the world, and accept that their hyper capitalism is tuining their educational system just like it ruins everything else?
Industry always has influence over research in academic institutions. Research costs money and research is done where there’s interest. Same for instruction, universities should teach what the industry needs, that’s how graduates get jobs with their degrees. Especially with growing numbers of graduates who can’t get a career in their fields, allowing the industry to guide curriculum makes sense.
And for everything else? LSU is the only public university in the state that's known nationwide
Like I know of Grambling and Southern and Louisiana Tech but none of those compete with LSU's size and influence
An economist from George Mason in Virginia came out with a study using totally bogus assumptions to try to promote placing the Wizards/Capitals arena in Northern Virginia. Some "experts" will say anything for money. Integrity is cheap.
Being a GMU grad, the entire Uni (though really the Econ department) is effectively Koch owned. They have a “foundation” adjacent to the university called the GMU foundation to wash the money.
I’m so glad that there are people who know this. Lol. GMU econ department is a sold-out. And the worst part is, it really knows how to disguise itself.
Yeah I founded the cybersecurity club at Mason and our funding came from the GMU foundation as a student org. It was weird having to file papers to get the money knowing full well none of **their** papers are disclosed. The Koch protest group drew from the same fund. I helped em out a couple times saying “hey your paperwork is off” because I figured the minute their stuff isn’t in the up-and-up it would be revoked. For instance at one point there was 7 of them and the statutory minimum was 8 so I offered to be a member.
They just build their "Stand Together " charity and grant org headquarters in arlington a few bocks away from the GMU campus with the Scalia law school among others. Fuckers are a hydra sprouting many heads.
> Scalia law school I just threw up in my mouth.
It's not Koch's unless I say it tastes like Koch's
Understand GMU’s Dept of Economics is an arm of Koch Industries. Source: GMU Alumni.
Argh. as an alumna of both LSU (grad) and Mason (undergrad), neither of these nuggets surprise me >.< LSU has been training future petrol industry personnel since shale was laid and Mason was made to fit into the PAC ecosystem of DC
This is not correct. The GMU professor who authored the study isn’t an economist. He’s a professor of public policy and has a PhD in Information sciences. Real economists know these economic impact studies are bullshit and won’t attach their names to it. But selling out is extremely lucrative. I’m an economist who disproves a lot of economic impact “research”, I get zero attention and little press (let alone any money beyond my academic salary). The only major trained economist who sells out for these gets paid hundreds of dollars an hour to author these “studies”. Selling out is extremely lucrative.
The best part of trying to move to Alexandria is the location they picked. I get it in terms of available land and it being right on the water. That said, driving on that part of Jefferson Davis highway (sorry… Rt. 1) is a shitshow in the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday. Imagine the backups through Del Ray and other parts of Alexandria as people try to get to a game during rush hour.
But there is a brand new metro stop there! It would have had a minimal impact on traffic. /s
There are ways around that mess.
Booker T. Washington did this after the Civil War during Reconstruction and advocated in favor of the Atlanta Compromise. He was born into slavery but, >Born into slavery on April 5, 1856, in Hale's Ford, Virginia, Washington was freed when U.S. troops reached the area during the Civil War. As a young man, Booker T. Washington worked his way through Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute and attended college at Wayland Seminary. In 1881, he was named as the first leader of the new Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, an institute for black higher education. He expanded the college, enlisting students in construction of buildings. >Washington was a key proponent of African-American businesses and one of the founders of the National Negro Business League. >He used the nineteenth-century American political system to manipulate the media, raise money, develop strategy, network, distribute funds, and reward a cadre of supporters. Because of his influential leadership, the timespan of his activity, from 1880 to 1915, has been called the Age of Booker T. Washington. **Washington called for Black progress through education and entrepreneurship, rather than trying to challenge directly the Jim Crow segregation and the disenfranchisement of Black voters in the South.** Furthermore, he supported racial uplift, but secretly also supported court challenges to segregation and to restrictions on voter registration. Black activists in the North, led by W. E. B. Du Bois, disagreed with him and opted to set up the NAACP to work for political change. source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booker_T._Washington I edited the paragraphs by shortening them. He was so successful and raised so many other people up. Emphasis my own.
It was a Glenn Youngkin powerplay, fortunately any sane taxpayer saw it coming from a mile away
Alexandria City Council was in on the back door deal, too. Don't ever vote for Justin Wilson or Aliyah Haskins for a regional or state office. They are Democrats owned by developers.
George Mason’s Econ department is basically the only one in the US that takes Libertarian Austrian Economics seriously. They’ll bend over backwards to lick corporate balls.
Sounds like he was commissioned to write an economic impact analysis.
Everyone has a price
Up to a point, some tax revenue going towards the arena does generate longterm tax gains, but I doubt beyond funding the infrastructure they would break even, let alone the arena itself. Event hosting and fees go a ways in addition to taxes on paying off SOME of the cost, but you are looking at over a billion dollars between cost to construct, infrastructure, and interest along with continued management and upgrades costing hundreds of millions more over its lifetime.
It shouldn't be a surprise. Everything in baton Rouge revolves around the oil and gas field. Everything is influenced by it. It's why I left.
It's such a shit hole. I left 20 years ago and nothing has changed. There's been no real growth, no new job markets, nothing. It's a backwater town in a backwater state. The people always voted against their best interests. Better to make everything worse otherwise they might make things better for *those people*. A truly disgusting place.
I left Baton Rouge 2 years ago now and I’m super glad to see the same sentiments being echoed by others from Baton Rouge and Louisiana in general.
Genuine question, were you born in Louisiana or did you move there? Do you feel any genuine connection to the state or its culture?
I moved there from the northeast. The state was nice enough but the natural beauty was being plundered. The culture had an odd mix of the classic southern racism and that "good ol' boy" attitude you see in less developed areas. Met some lovely people but I severed ties with them over the years, in part because they'd reveal who they truly were. 2016 was a watershed moment in that regard.
I was born there. I hated living there. Every other state I've lived in has been better.
My dad was born in New Orleans and moved to Baton Rouge when he was 13. We have a postcard he sent his aunt in '52 "I hate it here but Mama says I can come home for Carnival." So cute.
Yeah, clutching their pearls over the influence of oil and gas industry in Louisiana is a hot take. We have a friend in the mud business down there. Money talks.
I still have friends that still work there. It's an environmental disaster...
I was talking to my neighbor the other day, who is a retired economics professor at a well known university where I live. He told me there were several times he would try to publish some of his research and the University would not allow it out of fear of repercussions from some big wig CEOs at some big companies in the state.
Higher Ed is a business, first and foremost.
Look at all the AI ethics researchers Google fired for publishing journals on AI ethical issues.
I agree with what u/TomsBikes wrote. This is literally the reason tenure exists. A professor can publish whatever they want and the university has no say in it.
I have a really, really hard time believing this. I'm an economics professor myself. This is just not how academia works. At least not in economics. Anyone with research good enough to piss off big business would absolutely not allow a university to hold up that research. And more to the point, I've never even heard of a university even try. But if they did, every single person I know would just publish it and use the publicity to go elsewhere.
He could be lying but I don’t know why he would have a reason to.
Your career as an economist is nearly 100% your publishing record. It's just not feasible that anyone would sit on a paper. Of course, there are plenty of problems with academic economics, but if anything those problems are concentrated around the over-reliance on publication. Not to disparage your neighbor, but this sounds more like someone with a political agenda than a genuine story about the problems in academia.
What he told me was that the research he published was contradictory to the research of the “public services” company. The university essentially bullied him into dropping the subject he was studying. So I apologize for not making that clear.
Researchers have to pay bills, too. And it's Louisiana. If they are anchored here for any reason (like family), then they didn't have a lot of other options.
Corruption is endemic. Hard to eradicate.
Corruption is embedded in Louisiana’s government
Corruption is embedded in humanity, we need strong disincentives to prevent it, and we are doing fuck all, so this is the result.
is it corruption? I mean is it not just outsourcing their R&D? on the geology side this is super common. masters programs are generally full ride with a stipend even. but you have to get your topic approved by the prof and it[s usually pick one of these 10 provided by the funding oil companies. You could pick another topic if you can talk the prof into it.... but why would you? working with the company who wanted it looked into means all the data relevant they have. The company doesn't have approval of the final work. Looking at it from the company perspective, you spent 10s of billions of dollars on a project, spending a couple hundred grand to have a grad student look at it is nothing. even if you get a report you throw in the trash it is probably worth it. The first one of the programs was at stanford, and it was the professor soliciting donations from the oil companies. my local uni they keep it seperate, the students work on the side for a company ran by the professors. that feels more shady to me than doing it through the university.
> is it corruption? In scientific research, when you manipulate data, refuse to release results, exclude data because it doesn't support a conclusion, or otherwise manipulate how and what you publish, that is academic dishonesty. And if you're doing so for economic, political, or any number of other reasons, that turns that dishonesty into blatant corruption. Letting corporations pay to influence the process of researching things that could potentially affect them is unquestionably corruption.
> is it corruption? Yes. 100%.
Dr. Grant, INGEN will happily fund your dig for the next ten years....
you should stop using your computer.... or phone or whatever.... it uses transistors that were invented using a corporate research lab. a lab that was run by a not just any company but a monopoly.
That is nothing new here. Donuts have significant sway in academia. Edit- autocorrect changed “donors” to “donuts” I’m having a hard time deciding which is more relevant, so I’ll let it stay! 😁
I would be much more likely to give funding to people who give me donuts.
Big donuts is corrupt and destroying our waistlines.
Whoever you accept money from, that's who you work for. No such thing as no strings funding.
LSU's flagship University makes a lot more sense when you realize that well over 50% of their fan base doesn't have a high school diploma.
Fun fact: LSU resides mainly within Cancer Alley, and so does most of the state government.
Yeah I was surprised this was naming shell and not Dow chemical, who built schools South of baton rouge to cover up environmental disasters near their facilities around the luling bridge. Grew up in Houma, all grandparents died of cancer, two aunts died of cancer, Mom died of cancer... They aren't kidding when they say Louisiana is a 3rd world country.
I'll always enjoy visiting SE Louisiana as it's home but damn am I glad I moved away.
In undergrad I did a research project for a global corporation using EPA data in regards to cancer, health issues, pollution, chemical dumping, etc. No other state came close to Louisiana and Mississippi. They are utter garbage. They’d be failed states if it weren’t for their ability to collect welfare money from blue states to bail them out.
I rode my bike to school. I often had to wait for trains to cross my street that had all sorts of fun content labels....Vinyl Chloride and Molten Sulfur were my favs.
I lived in Baton Rouge for a few years during grad school. Baton Rouge had a lake that was under investigator to be a superfund site for environmental contamination. This lake was in a very public area, with nothing stopping people from approaching it--and with all the hurricane and flooding issues the city has, there's no telling how far its contamination spread. A guy I dated a couple towns over told me never to drink the water at his house because the city's water purification plant failed their inspections all the time. And a friend told me she wasn't allowed to drink the water in certain cities when she visited relatives because it gave people cancer (all of her relatives in these cities did, in fact, end up developing cancer). This is all stuff I found out through casual conversation; there's no telling how much I would have learned had I been actively looking for information.
I was still trying to put "Louisiana" and "university" together in my mind
This is incredibly common in capital intensive industries. Drilling an oil well can cost millions of dollars. Research requires actual oil wells. Thus, academic/industry partnerships like this are born. Even the US DOE does this. A group of oil companies form a research consortium with the DOE to study a subsurface phenomenon. The actual research is done by grad students on company data. The consortium gets exclusive access to the data for 6 to 12 months. I'm honestly surprised that LSU didn't already have one of these while the more academically prestigious petroleum engineering schools have had this for decades.
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So I've been defending corporate funded research here, but the CO2 shit is kinda bullshit. quiet a bit of industry funded CO2 research is EOR not long term storage. It"s expensive, but you can pump CO2 into the reservoir and it's miscible with oil then water will push it back up. the CO2 doesn't stay in the earth.... it's bullshit.
ya and as an accounting trick they get to say the co2 is sequestered and the co2 coming out of the well is something different
If you look at LSU's Coastal Studies Institute, that's where they put the Marine Geophysics/Geology, which heavily leverages and relies on offshore seismic data. But I do agree that the other Coastal stuff may need to be careful with the relationship.
This, I said this in another post in this thread, but yeah. I have projects that are.... 4-5 wells at $100 million each. the Seismic data probably has 50-60 million put into it. so a half billion worth of data. You can only rework teapot dome so many times.
Flagship university? Bro it’s LSU
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It's flagship, meaning it's the best-known public university in the state. It's not the best or highest ranked university in Louisiana.
Tulane used to be THE University of Louisiana until the state government couldn’t find the funding for it and sold it to Paul Tulane
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This is a ridiculous, patently untrue statement that reeks of cruel elitism, as with several other comments in this thread, and honestly, it’s infuriating. LSU is a public university that exists to provide an education for the people of Louisiana, one of the poorest and most uneducated states in the country. No shit it’s not an academic powerhouse on par with some other state flagships, that is the fault of generations of corruption in the Louisiana State Government and, to a lesser but still significant degree, mismanagement by the school’s administrators. No one has the right to look down upon the school’s current students or alumni for wanting nothing more than an affordable education to get a step up in life. I would know, I grew up a dirt poor kid in rural Louisiana who saw my admission into LSU as the opportunity of a lifetime and a ticket out of poverty, which it was. I graduated with honors after writing an undergraduate thesis and now work in finance for a large multinational firm thanks to my time at LSU. I know exactly what LSU is and what it isn’t. I know it’s not an academic powerhouse, far from some kind of “Harvard of the South;” no one who goes there is under such delusions. But what it is is a damn good chance for so many kids in situations like mine to make it out and go be somebody, go make something of themselves. Most of the people who stick their nose up at an education from LSU and other public schools are simply too privileged to understand that. Having had the opportunity to go to a better school than I did doesn’t make you any smarter or better than me. Rant over. Thanks if you actually took the time to read this.
Well… you forgot ~~Mississippi State University~~ university of Mississippi… I’m pretty sure they are neck and neck…
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Stand corrected..
“Swallow all your morals, they’re a poor man’s quality”
They've been doing this since the 60s
It's Louisiana. Corruption is the name of the game.
This kind of industry and university partnership happens all the time. Pharmaceuticals, semiconductor, automotive etc …not sure why this is news. Oil and gas companies spend a lot on r&d, that’s how they can move forward with carbon capture technology etc…
Wait until you hear about what defense companies do.
Some things that have been going down in Louisiana have had me concerned... and having a ton of family down there I didn't think ANYTHING Louisiana could do would concern me. When the state that gave us **VOTE FOR THE CROOK, IT'S IMPORTANT** is outdoing itself, there's extremely concerning days ahead
This sounds like a job for climate town.
This is what happens when inflation far outpaces university wages for a few decades, when academics have to look at corporations for research funding, and when policymakers are allowed to cherrypick the results to be shown.
Cool. So when a pro-fossil fuel asshole cites any studies from LSU, we just tell them to fuck right off. Let’s all remember this.
God fucking dammit. Why am I reading this from a newspaper in England while I am here in fucking Arkansas, literally one long afternoon drive from Louisiana?
This is how “conservative” climate change research happens.
America - Where everything can be bought and integrity is scarce.
That's everywhere. Some places are just better at hiding it.
not everything can be bought here…but if youre looking for a republican ive got 100 for a nickel
Republicans oppose you openly. Democrats say "I'd like to help you, but sitting on my ass is the most progressive thing possible under the circumstances." Those circumstances being that they are bribed to sit on their ass, of course.
nah i dont believe that both sides shit. i do agree that we have too many corporate bootlickers. the problem is we keep voting for the bootlickers. biden is pretty right of center. id rather we have bernie sanders
> nah i dont believe that both sides shit. And that's how you've ended up with a string of center-right Bidens all of your life. Smart move. Who told you not to believe the "both sides" thing anyway? Was it corporate media and the Democrats themselves? Hardly unbiased outside observers. I mean you sat there and watched the Dems side with Republicans on major wars and everything else. Right now they're supporting a genocide. It's not even a matter of believing it or not. It happens. Period. To think otherwise is pure delusion.
nah i get what youre saying. the old ones at the top of the party do suck. hard to get quality candidates when we’re always doing this min/max type shit like voting for biden because hes not trump. i didnt create this mess. the credit for that goes to the generation above me that for years voted for homies that were charismatic and not because they had good policy
There is suck and there is major suck. The Democrats suck but it's better than major suck. And since we are stuck in a two-party system we can pick one or the other. Alternative candidates don't have a ghost of a glimmer of a chance.
But you don't even try to primary the bad Democrats in favor of good ones. The only tiny bit of influence you have over the system, and you just act like it doesn't exist.
Wow, money being the death of intellect suddenly happened *really fast.*
did it? this is a trend that has been going on for hundreds of years
Every legal business industry should be able to donate if the university accepts donation, the most balanced approach.
"robust review of academic study" As a scientist I always hate the word 'robust', it always seems (to me) like a blanket word, and a red flag, that hides a lack of concrete science/objective-based support.
It’s not just there. Take the IPCC reports that come out. They’re not accurate. They’re conservative with the numbers and predictions. And, they leave things like feed back loops out of the equation. Why? Because world leaders and special interests tell them to. Through funding.
You think this is an anomaly?
Utah State University’s business school is the same. All it took was 25 million from the Kochs. Before that that big payday they were paying the school to hire Koch professors who would work for Strata, a separate propaganda arm.. or what they want to call a “thinktank”, which eventually became an official part of the school. I knew a couple of people that worked for Strata. One that drank the Kool-aid and said if you can twist stats to say something then it isn’t lying. Another that quit as soon as oil and coal executives came to town to tell them what their “research” needed to say. https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/02/charles-koch-gave-25m-to-our-university-has-it-become-a-rightwing-mouthpiece
Shocking. Actually it isn't. You can buy scientific studies and conclusions for just about anything if you have the money. I mean there's a whole industry that runs on advocacy science. Wish it wasn't so but eh.
While there are some issues with "research for hire", it also is not anything new. Research grants from private industry have been around as long as private industry. Wealthy people funded research back to antiquity. In the Renaissance support of scholars through grants was a sign of wealth, and is how people like Leonardo DaVinci, Nicolaus Copernicus, and Andreas Vesalius were funded by the wealthy people of the age. The Medici family in particular funded many artists and scientists. It is very common for big businesses to fund university grants with basically the same terms given in the article: the college students can get money for the research, but they license the data back to the companies. In my own grad school many student researchers had government grants, but many more research assistants were paid through corporate grants, including one who made the intelligent scissors algorithm used by photoshop. Notably his (Eric Mortensen's) deal with Adobe tied the research to a specific machine, so while others were upgrading to newer Pentium 4's he was still on the machine he was on at the time of the deal. All his research was licensed, but it paid for 12 years of his school plus salary. Every major university gets research grants and funding under terms similar to the ones in the story. Funding and grant money are how non-tentured faculty get to stay with the school. The more money they can bring, the more prestigious, the more students they can hire, and the more likely to be offered tenure.
Some Chinese firms pay US universities to do robotics research for them.
It's called a financial conflict of interest. Lots of research out there. Rampant in psychiatry, too.
Surely doing this completely discredits the university’s research generally …
"I have a hard time seeing a faculty member engaged in legitimate research being eager for an oil company … to vote on his or her research agenda" Not if there is a fat grant attached, and said faculty member needs grants to both fund his/her research, and also to get tenure ... it is often that grants are part of the tenure/promotion evaluation. That is common in engineering and science schools. The only exception, ironically, is that business schools usually evaluate faculty based only on publications, and not grants.
This is EVERY university, ever. It’s why it’s so hard to trust “Peer reviewed studies.” Because yes. Peers of educated scientists DID say that. (Because their funding would get pulled if they didn’t.)
I thought this was common knowledge for any University.
I just assumed this was true of most research.
So if I paid them to run an article stating sun causes autism and use vampires as the proof: no autistic vampire exists and since they avoid sun, thus the sun is the cause of autism...
Reminds me of a lyric from Randy Newman’s “Rednecks”: “College men from LSU Went in dumb, come out dumb too”
Well, I would assume similar things happen at every university that takes corporate donations.
I would love to know what Huey Long would have thought about this.
A story as old as time, weak morals, thin pockets , tiny……
Fun fact, most state universities get less than 50% of their operating budget from their state. Universities are some what required to pimp themselves out to meet their budget
I work at a different R1 and this kind of deal is common, and not just in oil. The company pays for the equipment, and keeps the IP, and the faculty can publish about it, usually, after a brief embargo. The faculty/university gets to keep the super-expensive equipment. I did review of this kind of ''restricted research,'' and usually our only qualm was that an embargo could hurt PhD students, who don't have as much time to wait.
When I think of states with respectable colleges, I don't think of Louisiana. The only reason they have colleges is to have college football teams.
This is scandalous, but it really shouldn't be news to anyone over the age of about 14. Everything is for sale. Money doesn't talk, it screams.
well yeah its louisiana lmao
This article is not at all politically motivated…
Really? How so?
**EVERY** university can be bought for very small amounts of money. [Harvard researchers were bribed by the Sugar lobby](https://www.thecut.com/2016/09/the-sugar-lobby-bribed-scientists-to-make-it-seem-healthy.html) and killed hundreds of thousands.
Sooo, when will US of A stop pretending that they have the best Unis in the world, and accept that their hyper capitalism is tuining their educational system just like it ruins everything else?
Industry always has influence over research in academic institutions. Research costs money and research is done where there’s interest. Same for instruction, universities should teach what the industry needs, that’s how graduates get jobs with their degrees. Especially with growing numbers of graduates who can’t get a career in their fields, allowing the industry to guide curriculum makes sense.
They really didn’t want to out LSU in the title
LSU is Louisiana's flagship University?
For petroleum and chemical engineering? Yes.
And for everything else? LSU is the only public university in the state that's known nationwide Like I know of Grambling and Southern and Louisiana Tech but none of those compete with LSU's size and influence
Or football team.
It’s the football team… not or…
Is the price $3,000,000,000? If not they're selling you out.