May 21, 2010

A question of standards - University of Virginia

A great editorial by Barbara Hollingsworth at The Washington Examiner:
U.Va.'s dishonorable double standard
University of Virginia students pledge not to lie, cheat or steal under the nation's oldest student-run honor system -- and to report any of their peers who do.

But U.Va. administrators apparently don't think they have an obligation to do the same. On April 23, university officials received a subpoena from Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli requesting the e-mails of former U.Va. climatologist Michael Mann in an investigation into whether Mann fraudulently used manipulated climate data to apply for $500,000 worth of taxpayer-funded research grants.

At first, they indicated their intention to comply. However, angry protests from academics around the country accusing Cuccinelli of a "witch hunt" convinced them to take a second look at their "options." But those options boil down to two: Turn over the documents subpoenaed under the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act by the July 26 deadline, or ignore Cuccinelli's request for any "correspondence, messages or e-mails" between Mann and 39 other prominent scientists between 1999 and 2005.
And a bit more:
On Dec. 17, Assistant Vice President for Public Affairs Carolyn Wood told Marshall: "The University does not have any e-mail data for Mr. Mann. When Mr. Mann moved to Penn State his U.Va. account was terminated and all data was later deleted."

Wait a minute. If Mann's e-mails were all deleted, why did U.Va. ask for-- and receive -- an extension to comply with Cuccinelli's subpoena? By happenstance, university officials also received another FOIA request on Dec. 17 regarding another former U.Va. climatologist -- Patrick Michaels, now a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

But Michaels' correspondence was apparently not deleted after he left; Greenpeace is reportedly currently waiting for word on how much it will cost to duplicate his e-mail cache. So even though Mann and Michaels worked in the same department on the same floor and used the same computer server, U.Va. supposedly preserved one scientist's electronic trail -- and destroyed the other's.
A real question of ethics -- even if the files were deleted from the server, any competent backup system will have them on tape in a vault somewhere. For one person to have the archives (and with a cost being talked about, it sounds like the tape-in-vault scenario) and not the other, this is seriously fishy. That work was funded by our tax dollars and is, by Federal law, in the public domain. We have a right to access this and for it to be withheld by some administrator and policy wonk is not cool. For them to lie to us is even less cool. Posted by DaveH at May 21, 2010 8:40 PM
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