Post-Burn Trauma OSU smolders after forestry college fiasco. BY KERA ABRAHAM In the flammable world of forestry academia, all eyes are focused on Oregon State University. There, a grad student's one-page research paper on post-fire forest ecology — and several faculty members' shrill reaction to it — sparked a debate over academic freedom at a college sponsored largely by the timber industry. OSU College of Forestry Dean Hal Salwasser In their attempts to appease industry representatives, senior college administrators aimed to discredit the student's research. They soon found themselves caught in the national media spotlight, in bed with big timber. How will OSU repair the damage from "damage control" gone wrong? The drama began in July 2005, when OSU forestry engineer John Sessions and others released a report encouraging the Forest Service to aggressively log and replant federal forest burned in the 2002 Biscuit Fire. College of Forestry Dean Hal Salwasser posted the report on his web page, and it became the key scientific basis for Oregon Congressman Greg Walden's timber-friendly bill, the Forest Emergency Recovery and Research Act, now before Congress. Then OSU graduate student Daniel Donato and his research team released a paper reporting that post-fire logging killed seedlings and increased fuel loads in burned areas of the Siskiyou National Forest. Donato's study, unlike Sessions', was data-rich, peer-reviewed and accepted for publication by the prestigious journal Science. The timber industry didn't like the suggestion that burned forests could best recover on their own. Sessions and five like-minded OSU faculty members wrote a letter to Science editors criticizing the integrity of Donato's study and requesting a delay of print publication. That move prompted accusations of censorship from academics across the nation. Salwasser, who testified in support of Walden's bill, has apologized for allowing Sessions and his colleagues to send the letter to Science. But emails obtained through a public records request by Oregon Sen. Charlie Ringo reveal that Salwasser wasn't the hapless referee, but rather the orchestrator of the campaign to discredit Donato's report. It was Salwasser who took the heat from timber industry reps after Donato's study hit cyber-space on Jan. 6., and Salwasser who counseled Sessions and others to write the letter to Science at timber lobbyist Chris West's suggestion. OSU students and faculty got the message: To publish research that threatens timber profits is to become a target for attack, harassment and ridicule. "Folks will not remember what the original article was about or the rebuttals that followed, but most will remember that a group of COF faculty tried to squelch an article whose study design and conclusions they disagreed with," wrote Fisheries Department Head Dan Edge in a Jan. 19 email to Salwasser. The dean seemed aware that his actions could hurt the college's reputation, recruitment and maybe even his own job security. "No one's career is through except maybe those of us who stepped into the fray," Salwasser replied. "Often someone does go down over these messes but it will not be faculty or students." Donato, for one, seems to have benefited from all the hoo-ha. Despite intense scrutiny, no credible scientist debates his study's basic findings. To the contrary, even Salwasser and Sessions admit that his results were logical. "Regeneration of seedlings is not better after you've logged," Salwasser told EW in March. "The biology just doesn't work that way." While Sessions, Rep. Walden and others attacked him, Donato — on NPR, at a congressional hearing and presenting to his peers — spoke as a scientist. He never insulted his attackers and limited his comments to the media. "The claims we hear of a flawed study are being made by people who don't know the study," he told EW. "When people learn about the study, they see that it addresses its research questions quite well." In early May Donato flew to the State University of New York, by invitation, to speak to other forestry grad students about his experience at the center of the controversy. In the space of four months, he's gone from an unknown grad student to a celebrity in forestry circles. The College of Forestry, on the other hand, has not fared so well. An anonymous survey of college grad students and faculty, conducted by the newly created Academic Freedom and Responsibility Committee, may be the harshest-yet indictment of its administrators. A majority of the survey's 151 respondents, representing one-third of grad students and 40 percent of the faculty, feel that problems at the college limit their academic freedom. Many respondents described the college as a place run by white, "inbred" "good old boys" who intimidate and disparage those who don't agree with their industry-friendly perspectives. They portrayed a "culture of fear" marked by closed-door decision-making, undisclosed timber interests, harassment (particularly of women) and a sharp divide between ecologists and foresters. "You should be aware … that students are freaking out," one respondent wrote. "I am ashamed to be receiving a degree from this institution ... My future has been damaged because of the black mark that will forever follow all COF graduates." Committee chair Norm Johnson, a professor of forestry policy, said that the committee will make recommendations to senior administrators on May 12, and new policies may be enacted as early as June. "It's true: We're not the same college we were six months ago," he said. But there's reason to doubt that lasting changes will result from the committee's recommendations. As a land grant school, OSU is married to the state's agriculture industry. The College of Forestry gets a chunk of its funding from a state timber harvest tax — a direct incentive for cutting more wood out of Oregon's forests. Salwasser will likely keep his job, according to OSU spokesman Todd Simmons. "The dean continues to serve and has no plans to step down and there are no plans to ask him to step down," he said. Meanwhile, other forestry schools are observing the controversy with interest. Both University of Idaho Forest Resources Department Head Jo Ellen Force and SUNY Natural Resources Professor Don Floyd said that their students and colleagues have discussed the situation at OSU and the pattern of collusion between forestry schools and their industry sponsors. UW forest resources professor Thomas Hinckley speculated that in the long run, the controversy may result in little more than a new policy for forestry college administrators: Rather than creating a record of bias with emails, "use the telephone."
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