Hurricane Trump Bears Down on Science

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President Trump’s general distaste for the nation’s “elites,” a broad moniker that comfortably includes the professoriate, was more narrowly focused Thursday on a single piece of academic research that the president finds politically inconvenient. In two early-morning tweets, Trump blasted the merits of a study from George Washington University that placed the death toll from Hurricane Maria near 3,000 — far more than the 64 deaths that the Puerto Rican government had originally acknowledged.

In his tweet, Trump posited that the independent study had been “done by Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising Billions of Dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico.”

The tweets provoked an uncommon tangle between a president of the United States and a university over the merits of a piece of scholarship. The back-and-forth appeared to signal a new front in a long-simmering feud between Trump and higher education. This wasn’t a broad critique of pointy-headed know-it-alls, as is the president’s custom; this was Trump, in his own bellicose way, attacking scientific methodology and impugning the motives of a specific group of researchers.

At issue is a study, commissioned by the government of Puerto Rico, that was released last month by George Washington’s Milken Institute School of Public Health. In collaboration with scientists from the University of Puerto Rico Graduate School of Public Health, George Washington researchers analyzed death certificates and other related information to determine that there were 2,975 “excess deaths” in the wake of the storm.

The study, which examined mortality rates from September 2017 to February 2018, was designed to include deaths that occurred in the aftermath of a storm that eviscerated parts of the island’s infrastructure.

The Puerto Rican government has accepted the researchers’ count as the official death toll. But Trump, questioning the study’s scientific rigor without offering any specific evidence, said that the study must have counted “a person who died for any reason, like old age.”

The president’s assertions prompted a statement from George Washington University, stressing that the researchers had employed a “state-of-the-art mathematical model” to reach their conclusions.

“We stand by the science underlying our study,” the statement says.

Alternate Reality

With Hurricane Florence bearing down on the East Coast on Thursday, Trump’s tweet created an unexpected news cycle around the soundness of a widely accepted academic study. Carlos Santos-Burgoa, who led the study, said Thursday morning that he had been inundated with interview requests.

“I have forwarded your request to our media relations,” he wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “Sorry … too many now and need to organize.”

Santos-Burgoa was not made available to The Chronicle, but he told USA Today that his team had been “obsessed” with getting peer input. The methodology, he said, was reviewed by a Johns Hopkins University researcher and by a panel of experts in the field.

“We were doing the project, but we had other eyes looking at us,” Santos-Burgoa said.

This wasn’t Trump’s first critique of higher education, but it was arguably his most direct. He has waded into the free-speech debate, for example, blasting the University of California at Berkeley, in 2017, after violent protests there prompted campus officials to cancel a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos, the conservative agitator. But Trump’s tweets on Thursday got at a more fundamental aspect of the academy, critiquing, in a few angry characters, the efficacy of the scientific method.

Elizabeth M.P. Madin, a marine ecologist and assistant research professor at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, said it was “disturbing” to see “our leaders undermining the credibility of science in the eyes of the public.”

Madin said she thought Trump, by denying the findings of a study that has made its methodology transparent, would only undermine his own credibility. She conceded, however, that some people will not fact-check him, and will accept his conclusions.

“That creates an alternate reality for people that is not based in reality at all,” she said.

In April, Madin wrote a column for Fast Company, saying that she was moving back to the United States, after years of research in Australia, because she wanted to be a voice for evidence-based decision making in a country where science is under attack.

“Although this choice may seem counterintuitive in a political climate that is overtly hostile to science and solving environmental problems,” she wrote, “I believe that science and scientists are needed in the United States now more than ever before.”

Trump’s tweets on Thursday, Madin said, felt like a turning point.

“I haven’t seen anything that’s been such a direct attack on an individual study and the specific methods,” she said. “That feels a little closer to home, and I would certainly hope that doesn’t become the beginning of a trend.”

Political Science

Scientists aren’t infallible, and rigorous debate about their findings is part of the process of discovery. What set Trump’s actions apart was the use of the bully pulpit of the presidency to take a layman’s jab at a specific study. Even in an era where political fights rage over scientific matters, particularly climate change, this felt different.

But the challenge for academics remains the same, said Laurie A. Leshin, president of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and a former NASA scientist. Scholars, she said, need to remain focused on producing strong research that can withstand scrutiny — even on Twitter.

“Skepticism is not a foreign concept to experts,” Leshin said in an email to The Chronicle. “Academic researchers working with new data, discoveries, and analysis should always be prepared to defend both the veracity and relevance of our work to a variety of audiences. The key is to address questions directly with data and hard-earned insights, and not get drawn into the politics of the day.”

The politics of the day, however, have a way of inserting themselves. Michael E. Mann, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, has learned as much, as an atmospheric scientist who is often at odds with climate-change skeptics and conservative politicians.

In an email to The Chronicle on Thursday, Mann said that being attacked politically is unpleasant, but it can afford a scientist an even larger platform.

“The attacks I’ve endured from fossil-fuel-industry groups, and the politicians and hired guns that do their bidding, are not what any scientist ever signs up for,” said Mann, who wrote about his experiences in his book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, whose title refers to a graph depicting the sharp rise in world temperatures. “They’ve included threats against my life and even against my family, hostile investigations by congressional Republicans and a former Virginia Republican attorney general, and demands for me to be fired from my job.

“But I have no regrets,” he continued. “Were it not for the prominence in the public sphere afforded by those attacks, I would not be in the position I now am to inform the larger conversation about the greatest challenge we face as a civilization — the challenge to avert catastrophic climate change. I consider myself privileged to find myself at the center of that conversation.”

Trump finds few public defenders in higher education. College leaders, who are often risk-averse when it comes to politics, have felt compelled to speak out against what they see as the president’s attacks on unauthorized immigrants, transgender people, and even the nature of truth. Thursday’s tweets were just the latest in what some described as a steady onslaught on higher education’s basic values.

But Trump has a reliable surrogate in Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University and the namesake of the late founder of the Moral Majority. In a tweet on Thursday, Falwell declared that Democrats routinely politicize natural disasters and that it would not work this time “because now we have a president who fights back!”

Asked about his tweet, Falwell said in a text message that his criticism had been “rooted in my suspicions about the timing of the report from GWU” — not the soundness of the research. Did he mean that the university had intentionally timed the release of its study to undermine Republicans in the midterm elections?

“It sure seems that way to me,” Falwell texted.

How much Trump will fuel that kind of skepticism remains to be seen, but it’s a source of concern to academics.

Mann, the climate scientist, said that the current public dialogue about science was presaged by Carl Sagan, the astrophysicist, who said that a sound-bite-driven culture would lead to a decline in sound reasoning and an embrace of superstition.

“I fear,” Mann said, “that the very future Sagan feared has, with Trumpism, fully now been realized.”

Jack Stripling covers college leadership, particularly presidents and governing boards. Follow him on Twitter @jackstripling, or email him at jack.stripling@chronicle.com.