Tom Friedman warms the hearts of policy professors everywhere:

I think it’s so great that so many schools are teaching ecology and the environment, and I would have taken that if I could have; I’ve had to learn that myself. The thing I would love to see? We really need a course in every school on environmental policymaking. Do you know how a utility works? I didn’t before I wrote [Hot, Flat, and Crowded]. I had no idea where the regulations got written. You really need a course in policymaking. If you don’t understand where the choke points and the leverage points are in the system, you can have all the environmental awareness in the world and you’re not going to be able to tilt the system. I’d love to see courses on environment and ecology because you need that foundation in science, but I think you also need to know where the policy is made. It’s much more important to change your leaders than your light bulb.

We have often argued that efforts to communicate science in order to realize political objectives rarely work and sometimes backfire. This is of course a critique of the so-called “deficit model” of science communication.

Here is another example from Kellstedt et al. from the journal Risk Analysis (PDF), with implications for all of those efforts to educate people about the science of climate change:

Perhaps ironically, and certainly contrary to the assumptions underlying the knowledge-deficit model, as well as the marketing of movies like Ice Age and An Inconvenient Truth, the effects of information on both concern for global warming and responsibility for it are exactly the opposite of what were expected.
Directly, the more information a person has about global warming, the less responsible he or she feel for it; and indirectly, the more information a person has about global warming, the less concerned he or she is for it. These information effects, while striking, are
consistent with the findings of Durant and Legge(47) with respect to genetically modified foods, and with those of Evans and Durant(48) with respect to embryo research. Thus, we contribute another parcel of evidence that the knowledge-deficit model is inadequate for understanding mass attitudes about scientific controversies. . .

. . . despite the overwhelming scientific consensus that global warming and climate change are real phenomena that create risks for the earth’s future, among the mass public, the more confidence an individual has in scientists, the less responsible he or she tends to feel for global warming, and the less concerned he or she is about the problem. Perhaps this simply reflects an abundance of confidence that scientists can engineer a set of solutions to mitigate any harmful effects of global warming.13 But it can not be comforting to the researchers in the scientific community that the more trust people have in them as scientists, the less concerned they are about their findings.

Of course, if my point is to educate you about the futility of education, then I’ve gotten myself into an interesting paradox, haven’t I?

Last week I received an email from our Chancellor, Bud Peterson, warning me and my CU colleagues of the perils of engaging in political advocacy activities as a university employee. Here is an excerpt:

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Not long ago we raised some questions about how well the University of Colorado’s commitment to sustainability was actually being reflected in actions. Recent remarks by our Chancellor, G.P. “Bud” Peterson, at a conference on sustainability last week suggest that our campus leadership is in fact now taking this issue seriously. Here is an excerpt:

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If you want a sense of how difficult it will be for 6.5 billion people to reduce, much less eliminate, their emissions of fossil fuels, consider this telling vignette from the University of Colorado, my home institution, here in Boulder.

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Larry Summers learned the hard way that there are some things that you just don’t do in a university setting. Nancy Greene Raine, Chancellor of Thompson River University in Canada who also was a gold medalist skier in the 1960s, is learning the same lessons.

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This Post Will Stay at the Top through 24 Nov, New Posts Will Still Appear Below

This semester in my graduate seminar Policy, Science, and the Environment we have spent a good share of the semester replicating and critiquing the Copenhagen Consensus exercise. With this post we’d like to solicit some feedback on the class term projects reporting and justifying their results

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For about the past two years I have served on the University of Colorado-Boulder’s Federal Relations Advisory Committee (FRAC). One issue that occupies a lot of the time and attention of the FRAC is the pursuit of congressional earmarks. In the FRAC we have discussed earmarking priorities for the campus, heard from faculty who want to pursue an earmark, and heard status reports from our lobbyists on prospects for earmarks. It is safe to say that federal earmarks have been a pretty high priority of the FRAC, at least during my time on the committee.

Long-time readers of Prometheus may recall these two pieces (here and here) from the past 18 months in which I have discussed the issue of congressional earmarks and my sense that the issue needs some attention here at CU-Boulder. However, aside from these pieces that allude to our discussions in the FRAC, in general I have stayed away from publicizing my concerns with Colorado-Boulder’s approach to academic earmarks and sought to work within the system to create effective change. No more.

Last week I resigned from the FRAC not only because I have found the campus approach to dealing with earmarks far too ad hoc for a major university, but because I viewed the process within the FRAC for potentially improving the approach to earmarking to be ineffective. After two years my patience has run out for working within the system and I have decided to simply make my case in a more public manner. So just like a policy wonk I have written an op-ed for our campus paper, which I am certain will make some people on campus a bit unhappy with me. The op-ed appears in the 9 November 2006 issue of the Silver & Gold Record, the newspaper for faculty and staff at the University of Colorado.

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The Environmental Studies Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder announces that it is recruiting a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Environmental Ethics. We are particularly interested in candidates with strong interdisciplinary interests and the ability to teach graduate and undergraduate courses in environmental ethics and the role of values in environmental policy-making. Candidates specializing in any areas of research and disciplinary background are welcome to apply. An earned terminal degree in the field of research specialization is required. The ability to interact with other departments is desirable. The Program is described at http://www.colorado.edu/envirostudies/ . Applicants should send a dossier that includes a CV and a statement of research and teaching interests, and arrange for three letters of reference to be sent, to Environmental Ethics Search Chair, Environmental Studies Program, 397 UCB, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309-0397. Review of completed applications will begin December 1, 2006, but applications will be accepted until the position is filled. The University of Colorado at Boulder is committed to diversity and equality in education and employment.

Frank Laird, of the University of Denver and a faculty affiliate of our Center, has a thought-provoking essay on the teaching of evolution over at the CSPO website titled, “Total Truth and the Ongoing Controversy Over the Teaching of Evolution.” Here is how he starts:

The 2005 legal decision in Dover, PA, and the elections for the Kansas State Board of Education, are only the most visible recent skirmishes in the controversy over teaching alternatives to evolution in public schools. Discussions of this controversy mix and sometimes confuse three distinct and separate, though related, processes: what teachers teach, what students learn, and what citizens believe. In a recent Pew poll (2005, pp. 1-2), 42% of Americans said they believed “that life on earth has existed in its present form since the beginning of time.” Proponents of teaching evolution often point to such data as evidence that evolution needs stronger support in the classroom to ward off anti-science trends in society.

However, thinking that you can change what citizens believe by changing what teachers teach is too big a conceptual leap. While there is certainly a relationship between teaching, learning, and belief, it is by no means simple or linear. By separating those processes out we can better understand them. The study of what citizens believe is a huge social question. Scholars have compiled huge amounts of polling data on what citizens believe, though interpreting that data comes with problems, such as assuming that belief is measured by response to questions instead of processes that get citizens to reflect and deliberate on questions. But in any case we know more about what people believe that why they believe it. While formal high school education may have some influence, so will family background, religious affiliation, occupation, race, income, and a host of unquantifiable cultural beliefs and ways of sorting true from false claims, what Sheila Jasanoff has called civic epistemology (Jasanoff 2005).

The second process, what students learn in biology class is a pedagogical question, one that those who study science teaching and learning are most qualified to answer. Anyone who teaches knows that there is not a simple relationship between what teachers teach and what students learn. Does discussing intelligent design (ID) lead to students learning less or more about evolution?

This Perspective focuses on what teachers teach. This in fact is the nub of the evolution controversy and viewing it as an institutional question can help to clarify the issues surrounding it. Strengthening the institutions that govern what teachers teach is both politically more feasible and ethically more defensible than trying to change what citizens believe.

Read the whole thing here.