Bush administration responsible for creating academic paranoia

I visited the Smithsonian for the first time just a few years ago and found it very disappointing. Apparently when it got the nickname “America’s attic,” the curators took that term to heart, and let themselves go with a disorganized mess. A lot of the exhibits were meaningless, stuff, aimed at placating special interest groups without offering anything of substance. I’d expected a walk through America, and instead ended up in PC back alleys. Since I’m a real museum hound, this truly saddened me.

The Smithsonian showed up in the paper today because a former administrator claims that fear of the Bush administration forced them to tone down an exhibit about the Arctic. Certainly, the story gets off to a zooming start:

The Smithsonian Institution toned down an exhibit on climate change in the Arctic for fear of angering Congress and the Bush administration, says a former administrator at the museum.

Among other things, the script, or official text, of last year’s exhibit was rewritten to minimize and inject more uncertainty into the relationship between global warming and humans, said Robert Sullivan, who was associate director in charge of exhibitions at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

Also, officials omitted scientists’ interpretation of some research and let visitors draw their own conclusions from the data, he said. In addition, graphs were altered “to show that global warming could go either way,” Sullivan said.

“It just became tooth-pulling to get solid science out without toning it down,” said Sullivan, who resigned last fall after 16 years at the museum. He said he left after higher-ups tried to reassign him.

To its credit, the AP report goes on to add a few details that indicate that Sullivan may be exaggerating just a wee bit, based upon his own disappointment about his inability to use the Smithsonian as a forum for his political sensibilities:

Smithsonian officials denied that political concerns influenced the exhibit, saying the changes were made for reasons of objectivity. And some scientists who consulted on the project said nothing major was omitted.

Sullivan said that to his knowledge, no one in the Bush administration pressured the Smithsonian, whose $1.1 billion budget is mostly taxpayer-funded.

Rather, he said, Smithsonian leaders acted on their own. “The obsession with getting the next allocation and appropriation was so intense that anything that might upset the Congress or the White House was being looked at very carefully,” he said.

White House spokeswoman Kristen Hellmer said Monday: “The White House had no role in this exhibit.”

Just to prove that it is an AP article, though, after this brief excursion into honesty, it shoots back into the accusatory role:

In recent months, the White House has been accused of trying to muzzle scientists researching global warming at NASA and other agencies.

Those were some interesting “muzzling” accusations, to be sure. What AP doesn’t point out, however, is that these accusations don’t hold up — including Sullivan’s current accusation, which falls apart by his own admission. As a further example, one of the “muzzled” scientists gave more than a thousand interviews about his opinions while on the job. In addition, although I can’t find the Best of the Web link right now, I distinctly remember an entry in that daily column pointing out that the “poll” of coerced (or do I mean “muzzled”?) scientists showed that only a minute number responded to the poll and, of those who responded, most of them were complaining that they “felt” as if they couldn’t speak out, not that they were in any way actually prevented from doing so.

But who cares what the reality of these complaints is? It’s enough that scientists are fantasizing about jackbooted thugs and are therefore rendered entirely incapable of saving the world from greenhouse Armageddon. These cowardly scholars must go to bed every night giving thanks that, while their jobs are at risk, brave Al Gore is risking administration opprobrium by forcing his basically ignored little movie on American school children.