Wait, what? Does it, or doesn’t it?

I will be posting agin on this matter soon at a major blog. if you sent a letter to CHE please forward to me.

ATTN: Phil Semas, President and Editor-in-Chief, the Chronicle of Higher Education

Sir–

I write regarding Peter Woods’ “A culture of evasion” as it appeared at http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/a-culture-of-evasion/33485.

Whatever Woods’ purpose, surely the whitewashing of the horrific Sandusky criminal behavior was sufficient to prove his case regarding the malfeasance of the administration of the Pennsylvania State University. I do not know much about the Spanier’s failure to disclose salaries of public employees, but tossing the disproven inquisition of the noble Professor Michael Mann onto the pyre is nothing less than character smearing and assassination, as well as endorsing horrible logic. Doing so strips the Chronicle of any pretense of representing “Higher Education”.

There are at least two fallacies in Woods’ piece: Administrative accusations are not the same as guilt, especially ones determined by process to be rejected. And that Professor Mann was exonerated by a tainted administration does not make his being cleared of administrative charges false. The Chronicle should be capable of basic reasoning, whatever its poor status in our enfeebled polity.

Also, the charges brought against Professor Mann can, in retrospect, be surely seen as an inquisition and ill-motivated, whether considering the findings of subsequent criminal investigations judging their basic evidence (the professional hacking of the Climatic Research Unit emails), or the highly successful results of projections and a line of climate research Professor Mann and others pioneered.

By failing to be a proper Editor, you implicitly endorsed this bad logic and form. It is not simply someone’s free expression that you allowed, but gross, harmful error, damaging to the principles for which higher education exists.

You owe your readership a retraction, an apology to Professor Mann, and an admission that your publication of this piece endorses bad logic, bad form, and unreasoned, populist attack. You have done so in the past. You owe the readership and Professor Mann one this time.

– Jan Galkowski, Class of 1976G, MIT,
Westwood, MA.

Mandia: Thank you!