Woody Allen once said that the most vicious fights take place in academia because there is so little at stake. He was partially right. He overlooked the fact that when there is money, prestige and power on the line, academics are as greedy, vindictive and vicious as anyone. Climategate is an excellent case in point.

An I surprised by the attempts to manipulate data, exclude and demonize critics, and control access to data and scholarly journals? Not at all! Most academics engage in such activities.

Am I skeptical of the empirical findings of the pro-climate change school? Yes – there are too much research money and prestige at stake. Anyone who is competent with statistics can take a body of data and produce whatever results s/he desires.

The best way to gain a better understanding of the role of human activity as a possible or principal source of global warming would be to put together a team consisting of people covering as much of the spectrum of views on this subject as possible, and have them agree on a dataset and statistical technology to be used. I am quite sure that if this could ever be arranged, the results would be ambiguous at best, and everyone would call for more analysis.

Climategate highlights the failure of the existing system of tenure that permeates all universities. Tenure is intended to allow academics to freely express their views and to undertake whatever research they find to be of interest. Academics do not have to worry about offending someone who could successfully push for their dismissal.

But to get tenure, one must be of the right background and play the game of publishing and getting research grants.  And one must publish in the right journals, not just any journal. These journals reflect the orthodoxy of the day in their particular fields. So to get published and get tenure, young academics have to follow and support the conventional orthodoxy in their fields. (Guess what it is in the climate sciences?) Or they must have friends on the editorial boards of these journals.

Being critical is the surest way of being terminated before one gets tenure. The colleagues who make the final tenure decision do not want young academics to challenge their work. Research grants also are available primarily for projects following in the footsteps of the discipline’s mainstream.

The tenure system stifles free speech in academia.

One of my professors in graduate school is one of the most intelligent people I ever have known. He is much brighter and more intuitive and interesting than most of the economists who have won the Nobel Prize. But at a very young age –  he was the youngest person to ever get tenure and a full professorship in economics at Harvard – he concluded that mainstream economics was absurd, and so he followed a much different track in his work. He rarely got published after that, at least not in the leading journals. Few have heard of him and he will never win the Nobel Prize.

For many years I was prevented from transferring over to join the faculty of the business school because I disagreed publicly with the works of two senior academics, both of whom were espousing the orthodox positions for free trade and deregulation. Of course, events proved me right, and only when they retired was I able to switch over. Undoubtedly, there are numerous other such examples worldwide.

I have argued for years that universities must do away with tenure if they are to encourage creative research which challenges every idea. I am not sure what system should replace tenure. But with the Internet, one way to gauge the importance and interest of someone’s research, might be to measure the number of downloads. Further, since I believe that people should move around and not stay in one place for life, short-term (five year) contracts might be another option.

Hopefully two things will come out of climategate: A greater scepticism by the general public and policy makers regarding the theoretical and empirical work of academics, and a replacement for the tenure system.