Oregon State University Center of Political Corruption Scandal

More 8March2011: Jerry Pournelle looks at this issue and concludes that something is very rotten in the state of Oregon. (h/t Instapundit)

Specific members of the Oregon State University administration and fraculty have apparently joined with US Congressman Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon) in what appears to be an act of blatant political payback against DeFazio's opponent in the November 2010 election for US Congress in Oregon's 4th District, Dr. Art Robinson.

Inconceivably -- in an unprecedented act of vindictiveness -- the DeFazio loyalists at OSU appear to have targeted the children of Dr. Robinson -- students in the OSU graduate school -- for prejudicial treatment, including dismissal without cause from their programs, and appropriation of their work without credit or attribution.

Political corruption and ideological bias within state-run educational systems may be widespread, but this level of blatant vindictiveness against children of a political opponent is almost certainly unprecedented. Here is more from Dr. Robinson:

OSU administrators think they can violate ethical academic standards of professional conduct, break formal OSU rules and regulations, and even violate U.S. laws with impunity because, in any resulting litigation, they would be defended by lawyers from the Oregon Department of Justice, assuring that only students with huge sums of money and many years to invest in litigation can oppose them. The Robinsons do not have those huge sums of money, and, moreover, they want to complete their education – not receive money in exchange for the destruction of their education and opportunities.

...As things stand today, Jack Higginbotham and his students and staff, along with Joshua Robinson are in immediate danger. Bethany Robinson is slated for dismissal soon after and without the Ph.D. that she has nearly completed. The dismissal of Matthew Robinson may not be far behind. And the danger to Professor Higginbotham's other students is likewise very high.

Please don't let this happen!

Please notify OSU of your interest in this matter and urge the university to stop its destructive actions against Joshua, Bethany and Matthew Robinson and against Professor Jack Higginbotham, the remarkable president of the OSU faculty senate who has risked his career to help them!

Contact information for the OSU nuclear engineering department is:

Phone: 541-737-2343
Fax: 541-737-4678
mailto:joan.stueve@oregonstate.edu

Mailing address:
116 Radiation Center,
Corvallis, OR 97331-5902

Please also contact the president of OSU, Edward Ray:

Phone: 541-737-4133
Fax: 541-737-3033
mailto:pres.office@oregonstate.edu

Mailing address:
600 Kerr Administration Building
Corvallis, OR 97331-2128

Here is the e-mail address of the OSU vice president for university relations and marketing, Todd Simmons mailto:todd.simmons@oregonstate.edu.

For more information or to take further action, please visit OregonStateOutrage.com. _ArtRobinson_via_GreenHell

When members of a particular ideology occupy faculty and administrative offices in such overwhelming proportions, the temptation to go beyond the academic mandate -- to exercise greater power than has been authorised by their position -- can become overwhelming. At first glance, this is what seems to have happened to the over-zealous OSU faculty and staff, in their efforts to please Congressman DeFazio -- who helps to determine their budgets and remuneration -- by punishing the children of DeFazio's opponent.

Stay tuned for more details as they become available.

Sending A Competent and Intelligent Man to Congress

Art Robinson PhD is a winner of the prestigious Al Fin Portrait of Competence Award. Dr. Robinson has already proven himself in the fields of science research, energy journalism, business, education, and ranching. But now that his six children all have their doctorates (or nearly so), it is time for a new challenge -- saving the US from the predators who are devouring the country from within. Art Robinson is running for US Congress, Oregon District 4.

ODE: How would you describe yourself as opposed to incumbent Congressman Peter DeFazio?

Robinson: There couldn’t be very many similarities. Generally I prefer smaller government, more freedom, fewer government programs, more free enterprise programs. DeFazio is really on the opposite side of that — he favors larger government and he’s known as one of the most liberal, or as they say, progressive, congressmen, so as he voted for the health care bill I would not have done that. He’s anxious for the government to regulate energy and fuel, and I think that’s a bad idea. In a general sense, DeFazio favors big government solutions to things and diminished freedom, and I favor small government and more freedom.

ODE: With that perspective, politically and economically, how do you view the recent financial collapse in America, because a lot of voices are calling for regulation now?

Robinson: I think they are making a mistake. Clearly the United States has got economic problems. They stem from several causes: One is a simple failure of the United States government to balance its budget. We have $14 trillion in interest-bearing debt — that’s roughly $40,000 for every American family. The private sector misbehaved, and the public sector misbehaved ... the government not only has a lot of debt, but it’s gotten to the point where it can’t incur any more, it just can’t do it. So the government has gotten itself terribly in debt, but so have the people. The people have made an error, but they have been induced to do this by irresponsible businessmen, bankers, people on Wall Street. Generally, if someone makes a mistake, you let him go down, so I don’t think the taxpayers should have paid a dime to bail out Wall Street ... We certainly shouldn’t further indebt the public sector to save the private sector. Ultimately, if things keep going like this, the public sector is going to have to declare bankruptcy too, and that will have to happen to clean things up....

ODE: You published a report on global warming that was somewhat controversial- where do you stand on the climate change debate today?

Robinson: Climate has changed forever. Greenland is so named because it was green in the middle ages, and they were growing crops there; that’s why its called Greenland. Now it’s covered with ice, because it’s cooler than it was in the middle ages. Fluctuations in climate occur all the time.

ODE: So climate change is not something we should be concerned about?

Robinson: No. It’s something that, basically, you have a field of endeavor in which scientists try to understand the changes and predict them, because there is certainly an advantage in being able to predict ... and it was fine, and then the field got hijacked by the politics and the hijacking didn’t do anything except obscure the good science. And, interestingly, if you look at what man can do to Earth temperature, if we wanted to be prepared for temperature change in the Earth we should hope that it gets too warm, because we can cool it. If it gets too cool, we can’t warm it. If the Earth gets too cold for us, there is nowhere to get the energy to warm it. It’s just not possible. If it gets too warm, it’s very easy to block enough sunlight to cool it, and several scientists have shown very economical ways that that could be done. I don’t advocate doing that today, but mankind can cool it to any extent it wants by blocking the sun, they can’t warm it at all. So if fluctuations go on, and uh, we had our druthers, we better get it too warm because that we can fix. I’ve read every paper in this field; I’ve studied this for ten years, and I can tell you — there is just nothing there. It’s a political front, unfortunately, that’s just what it is.... _OregonDailyEmerald

Dr. Robinson proposed a rather unusual series of debates to his incumbent opponent, Peter DeFazio. Robinson proposed to meet DeFazio in seven 2 hour debates -- one debate for each county in the district. Each candidate would speak for three minutes, followed by his opponent speaking for three minutes...and so on, for two hours. If anyone was still in the audience at the end of that time, they could ask any question they wished. Not a typical Washington style capaign debate -- particularly in this era when most democratic politicians are wisely hiding from their constituents. Not surprisingly, DeFazio declined such a highly exposed and public debate structure.

National politics in the US is marked by its blatant dishonesty, its under-the-table connections to special interests, a preponderance of Washington insiders who have become too comfortable in positions of privilege and power, and the increasing tendency to put the US in an unsustainable economic posture.

Can intelligent and competent persons such as Robinson save the country from the criminals and opportunists who are feeding on its carcass? Probably not. But perhaps if there were enough of them, they could slow the collapse enough to allow more thoughtful and prescient persons the time to prepare for what is likely to be coming.

Robinson's Access to Energy Monthly newsletter

The Robinson Curriculum

2001 American Spectator profile of Robinson

Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine

Portrait of Competence: Art Robinson

Art Robinson, PhD, lives on a 350 acre farm in Southern Oregon. The Robinson family has long maintained hundreds of sheep and lambs, over a dozen milk cows, dozens of wild turkeys, and miscellaneous dogs. Robinson has raised and homeschooled 6 children on the farm: Zachary has a doctorate in veterinary medicine and Noah has a PhD in chemistry. At present, Arynne is in her third year of work toward a DVM, twins Joshua and Bethany are both in their second year of work toward PhDs in nuclear engineering, and Matthew is in his second and last year of work toward a BS in chemistry. Each of the 6 children was taking college physics and math courses by age 16 -- if not before -- and each typically took only 2 years on-campus to finish undergraduate classwork.

Art Robinson received a BS in Chemistry from Cal Tech -- where he was a student of Linus Pauling -- and a PhD in Chemistry from UCSD, where he taught chemistry for a few years before teaming with Linus Pauling to form the Linus Pauling Institute in Menlo Park. After working with Pauling for several years -- and failing to substantiate Pauling's claims that Vitamin C cures cancer -- Robinson and Pauling had a parting of the ways. Robinson and his wife Lauralee -- also a scientist -- moved to Oregon in 1980 with young sons Zachary and Noah.

Between 1980 and 1988, Robinson and his wife lived happily on the farm -- creating a family of 6 young children, operating the farm and various scientific and other miscellaneous ventures. Then in 1988 within 24 hours of developing flu-like symptoms, Robinson's wife died of hemorrhagic pancreatitis. Their children at that time ranged between ages 12 and 18 months. The older children were being home-schooled by Lauralee, and the youngest was still in diapers.

Art Robinson picked himself up from this sudden tragedy and shouldered the additional responsibilities of single parenthood of 6 young children, most in homeschool. Somehow, Art structured the curriculum and format of the school so that in fact the children were able to teach themselves, for the most part. Then, with the children's help, Art packaged the family's complete homeschool curriculum -- The Robinson Curriculum -- and has been selling thousands of the 22 CD sets a year, at $195 a set.

Sales of the homeschool curriculum plus several other enterprising ventures have put Art's scientific career on a self-sustaining basis.

Suffice it to say that Art Robinson has recovered his financial independence. He no longer needs government grants to pursue the unresolved scientific questions that were put on hold over 20 years ago. In fact, his independence as a scientist is now greater than it would be if he were still at a large research institution. Whether the institution is nominally private, or publicly funded, he points out, most scientific research is held captive by heavy infusions of federal money.

Around the time he heard that the Proceedings of the National Academy would publish the article, Art said: "If we just had a few thousand scientists pursuing their own goals, we'd really be able to get some new research done in this country. As it is, most of them are trapped."

...Art took over Access to Energy in 1993, at the request of its ailing proprietor Petr Beckmann, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Colorado. Beckmann had printed the newsletter on his own press for 20 years. A defector from Communist Czechoslovakia, he valued the First Amendment highly—and exercised it through a printing press in the basement. Until recently, Noah continued to print the newsletter on the same press, which was hauled from Boulder to Oregon. The letter was always a lively read, and Robinson has preserved that quality. It is something you gladly reach for in the mailbox. A subscription costs $35 for individuals, $150 for tax-subsidized organizations (one or two do pay full freight).

...Art's warrior instincts also came to the fore after his daughter Arynne enrolled at Southern Oregon University. To graduate, she was told, she had to take a course called "colloquium," an exercise "specifically designed to destroy her faith, her innocence, her self-respect, and her happiness in her way of life," Art says. Advance placement had allowed the boys to skip this insult. So why not remove her from the school? As it happened, the science faculty was excellent, the university's proximity was convenient, and his tax dollars were paying for this travesty. "What can a student do if the science, engineering and mathematics courses are held hostage by the 'humanities' departments?"

Art informed the university administration that they faced law suits, adverse publicity, and "an ever increasing telephone, fax, and letter campaign." The first two did not worry them, Art says-they had the lawyers and the media. But the third did. It would have involved many thousands of inquiries, and they would be needing extra telephone lines and secretaries. The president backed down at the last minute. "We won this fight without firing a shot," Art told his friends, "but only because we were prepared to shoot." And they were able to do so only because a large number of his subscribers and home-schooling friends "were available to help.

... _IndependentScientist

Robinson and his son Noah -- also a PhD chemist -- work together studying the molecular clock of aging. They have their own lab on the farm -- complete with a very powerful mass spectrometer, and other instruments. They have published multiple papers together in various journals, including the National Academy of Sciences Proceedings and the Journal of Peptide Research.

Art has also been instrumental in countering the mass hysteria of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming, circulating a petition against CAGW with tens of thousands of scientists signing. Many more potential movements and enterprises are being worked out and knocked about inside his head -- much to the chagrin of the dieoff leftists of the world.

Most information for this story comes from A Scientist Finds Independence

Other information comes from an update on the Robinson Curriculum home site.

If you take the trouble to read either of the above links, you cannot help but be impressed by the multi-dimensional nature of Art Robinson's life. And still the impact of Robinson and his children (and his late wife) continues to reverberate through their work and through all of those who are influenced by their story, their curriculum, and all of their other numerous ventures and projects.