No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

Adam Smeltz's editor at the CDT has rewarded him for his two articles which revealed the collusion between Spanier and Jake Corman to gut the new open records law by assigning him to write a bird shit story and a press release for the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences.

According to Adam's story, the University intends to use a fog machine to get rid of a flock of crows which are nightly shitting over Old Main lawn. There's no word on what Graham and Penn State flack Bill Mahon will do while their machine is used on the crows.

The press release concerns a public forum on global warming. This sort of thing typically would get a paragraph in the community events section of the paper, but today it gets a full article with the headlined" Sharing 'Nobel Knowledge'" and a lede,"Five Penn State scientists honored with the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize will host a public forum tonight on global climate change."

Let's be clear, no Penn State faculty member has ever won a Nobel Prize. This is not changed by the fact that five Penn State scientists ,along with 1995 other scientists, served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. Don't believe me. Search the Nobel Prize Web site for the names of any of the five Penn State scientists. You'll get nada, because the Nobel folks don't recognize the individual members as Laureates. As usual Penn State is just spinning the truth.

Because Penn State pitches this as if they now have five Nobel Laureates on the faculty, it diminishes the actual accomplishments of the five fine scientists,Richard Alley, Bill Easterling, Klaus Keller, Michael Mann and Anne Thompson, by making it appear that the University administrators don't think that what these scientists have done is enough. Inflating their accomplishments by pretending that they've won a Nobel Prize only highlights Penn State's deep seated academic insecurity.

If Penn State were serious about becoming an academic powerhouse, rather than pretending to be one in its press releases, it would begin by throwing Spanier and his entire cabinet out. To achieve academic success, the University needs at its helm a true academic leader not an anti-intellectual marketer.


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