How To Get Rid of a Tenured Professor

TOO OFTEN, POLITICAL ADVOCACY TRUMPS RESEARCH IN SCIENCE.

- ROGER PIELKE JR.

I WAS A tenured full professor at the University of Colorado Boulder for almost 24 years. At the end of 2024, I left. Officially, it was a voluntary departure. But I sure felt like I’d been pushed out.

My story started in 2015, when Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D– Ariz.) asked the university to investigate me. He alleged that I may have been secretly taking money from Exxon in exchange for the substance of my congressional testimonies, in which I reported on the consensus scientific findings of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—that while heat waves and extreme precipitation had increased, there was vanishingly little evidence to support claims that hurricanes, floods, and drought have become more common or intense.

I was not taking Exxon’s (or anyone’s) money—not in exchange for testimony and not for anything else. What was odd was that after the investigation was announced and conducted, no campus administrator ever spoke to me about it, not even to check in and see how I might be doing. I heard only from university lawyers.

Not long after, I was told that university support for the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, which I had been recruited to Colorado to found in 2001, could no longer be guaranteed, and that the center might be closed. No one linked this explicitly to the Grijalva-related investigation, but I could not help but think they were related.

Sensing the issue was really me, I chose later in 2015 to leave the science policy center and the university institute it was a part of to go across campus and create a new sports governance center, focused on another of my intellectual passions, far from the reach of the climate police. I hoped that leaving the science policy center would allow it to continue while I continued to do teaching, research, and university service in another area where science meets politics.