Chronicle of Higher Ed on OSU Controversy

It's not often that a graduate student plays the leading role in writing a paper that lands in the journal Science, triggering an avalanche of critical questions from professors at his own university, not to mention a U.S. congressman.

And it's even less often that the work of a 29-year-old pursuing a master's degree prompts his university to reflect publicly about weighty issues like academic freedom and the appropriate role of industry support for scholarly work.

But that's what happened to Oregon State University's Daniel C. Donato after he wrote a paper that raised questions about the wisdom of logging trees burned in forest fires. The article on so-called salvage logging was published in January after faculty members from Mr. Donato's own institution failed to get Science to delay its release.

Just this month, a state senator released e-mail messages he had obtained from the dean of the university's College of Forestry that painted an unflattering picture of the dean's role in the controversy. The dean, Hal Salwasser, wrote colleagues about doing "damage control" on the paper and offered suggestions to timber-industry representatives about crafting a public rebuttal.

Mr. Salwasser also wrote of the study's effects on the college's fund-raising efforts and on a Congressional bill, which he publicly backed, that could increase salvage logging in Oregon. He now says he wishes he had done some things differently.

The fracas at Oregon State, while more extreme than most, illustrates the conflicts of interest that arise when public universities are expected to both produce high-quality, independent scholarship and improve the economies of their states.

Although colleges often successfully pursue both goals, there is a history of clashes between land-grant universities and agricultural-commodity producers, says Lawrence Busch, a professor of sociology at Michigan State University who studies agriculture.

Those tensions are accentuated in states where a particular group of commodity producers dominates - as in Oregon, where the wood-products industry is the largest manufacturing employer, with 75,000 jobs. Such influence, Mr. Busch says, "if not seriously examined, can lead to a distortion, if not a subversion, of the public interest."

Forest fires are a major problem in Western states, and in Oregon academic scientists have played a prominent role in studying them. Years of unusually dry weather have made forests more vulnerable. Researchers agree that periodic large blazes contribute to natural, healthy forest ecosystems by clearing out brush that can inhibit the growth of trees. But decades of federal efforts to suppress forest fires have had unintended consequences by allowing brush to accumulate, so that when fires do break out, they burn more intensely.

That was illustrated in 2002, when Oregon sustained the largest known forest fire in its history. Called the Biscuit Burn, the blaze destroyed 500,000 acres in two national forests in the southwestern corner of the state.

The fire rekindled a longstanding public debate: how best to restore the health of burnt forests and what to do with the charred, dead trees. Many of the Biscuit Burn trees were only partially burned, and had some residual commercial value as timber if cut down, a politically popular idea in Oregon.

Over the previous decade, the federal government - which owns the majority of the forests in Oregon - had curtailed logging, largely for environmental reasons. But in 2002 the Bush administration started to encourage the wider use of salvage logging, and so the U.S. Forest Service authorized a volume of logging in the Biscuit Burn area that represented one of the largest proposed single harvests ever on federal land.

Salvage logging has generated disagreement among academic scientists for years. Some studies have shown that the practice poses serious environmental risks, such as soil erosion and reduced habitat for wildlife. But relatively little research directly examined a key argument by supporters of the practice: that it helped speed forest regrowth after a fire and reduced the potential for subsequent fires.

Enter Mr. Donato. He had never had a strong interest in those questions, but he got involved in the issue because he was looking for a topic for his master's thesis. An Oregon State professor had received a federal grant to study salvage logging and took him on as a research assistant. Mr. Donato, who grew up near Portland and earned a bachelor's degree in forestry from the University of Washington, did most of the fieldwork, along with another graduate student.

He and his colleagues examined test plots within the Biscuit Burn in 2004, before salvage logging began there, and in 2005, after trees were removed.

Their results led them to conclude that salvage logging reduced regrowth and heightened the short-term risk of another fire compared with burnt areas left alone. On test plots that had been logged, the median number of new-tree seedlings was 71 percent lower than on unlogged plots. What's more, there was significantly more woody debris left on the ground in the logged areas as a byproduct of logging. That created a higher risk of fueling additional forest fires that could damage or wipe out new trees, the researchers found.

In what would be a coup for any graduate student, the paper was accepted for publication as a short report in Science, the most prestigious American scientific journal, with Mr. Donato as the first author. Science published the paper on its Web site in early January and a few weeks later in its print edition. In between, all hell broke loose.

The gap in time between the two publications - an artifact of scientific publishing in the age of the Internet - gave the paper's critics a chance to muster a campaign against it. Nine scientists, including six from Oregon State, wrote Science asking that the printed report be delayed, or at least that the journal run their critique in the same issue. Science refused.

Critics have since called the professors' move a stunning attempt at censorship, unprecedented in forestry research. The university's Faculty Senate called it a threat to academic freedom. The senate said the proper route for protest should have been to submit the critique to Science for later publication, which the dissenters have now done.

Faculty members also noted that one of most vocal dissenters was John Sessions, a forestry professor. Mr. Sessions was a coauthor of a 2003 report that supported expanding the use of salvage logging of the Biscuit Burn beyond what the Forest Service had initially planned, based largely on the economic value and volume of available wood. The agency cited his work in its decision to expand the proposed logging area. (The expanded area represented just 5 percent of the burned area, but some environmental groups in Oregon nevertheless called that too much.)

Mr. Sessions has also supported the view that salvage logging can help burnt forests regrow faster than if they were left alone.

In an interview, Mr. Sessions says that he and his co-authors on the January letter contacted Science because they felt they had an obligation to correct what he calls sweeping generalizations and glaring misrepresentations, arguing that it takes longer than the two years covered by Mr. Donato's study to reliably determine how many of the growing trees will survive to maturity. He also says the salvage logging on the Biscuit Burn was not done immediately following the fire, as he had recommended. As a result, the logging damaged trees after they had begun growing.

Detailed technical analysis of Mr. Donato's report also came from an unlikely source, a U.S. congressman, Rep. Brian Baird, a Democrat from Washington. He obtained Mr. Donato's data after filing a request under Oregon's open-records law and later sent a long critique to Science.

Representative Baird is a co-sponsor of a bill, the Forest Emergency Recovery and Research Act (H.R. 4200), that would allow federal managers to speed up salvage logging by waiving federally required environmental reviews, which delayed the start of logging in the Biscuit Burn. At a February hearing in Oregon, Mr. Baird grilled Mr. Donato, who appeared as a witness. A researcher sympathetic to Mr. Donato called it an "inquisition." Mr. Donato called it "painful."

Mr. Donato says he has been working around the clock responding to criticism of his study and has received more than 700 e-mail messages about it, most of them in support, some nasty. He says he has had no affiliations with environmental groups, despite what he describes as efforts by some of the study's critics "to show that I'm some kind of environmental whack job" out to stop logging, which "is clearly not the case."

While his team has arguments to rebut its critics, the group could not fit them into the Science report, whose format allowed only about 600 words of descriptive text. He says that both sides of the salvage-logging debate have erroneously argued that the report presented a definitive scientific verdict on the practice.

In a written statement posted on the College of Forestry's Web site, Mr. Donato and his colleagues said they wanted the paper "to stimulate discussion and further research with some much-needed and thought-provoking data on an under-studied topic. We have apparently achieved this!"

Even supporters of the paper say that, in general, the forestry-college's research findings do not appear to be biased toward industry interests. But those supporters have raised questions about a lack of neutrality during the controversy by the leaders of the college, especially Dean Salwasser.

He has said publicly that he reviewed a copy of the critique of Mr. Donato's paper before Mr. Sessions and others sent it to Science. In a written statement he issued in January, Mr. Salwasser focused on the limitations of the Donato study.

Charlie Ringo, the state senator who obtained Mr. Salwasser's e-mail messages from January under the state's open-records law, says they show that the dean's efforts were more extensive: "It's clear to me that the dean was acting as the pivotal person in coordinating the response to minimize the political fallout from the Donato paper," Mr. Ringo, a Democrat, said in an interview. For weeks, he said, Mr. Salwasser's "exclusive focus was to diminish the credibility of the paper."

In other e-mail messages, Mr. Salwasser provided suggestions to an industry representative about getting rebuttals to Mr. Donato's paper published in newspapers. In another, he talked about providing the rebuttals to U.S. Rep. Greg Walden, an Oregon Republican and a sponsor of the salvage-logging bill.

Mr. Ringo adds - and some faculty members agree - that it was awkward for Mr. Salwasser to testify before a Congressional committee in November in favor of the salvage-logging bill when researchers in his college had raised questions about the environmental effects.

Mr. Sessions and his fellow professors were not the only people who were unhappy about Mr. Donato's paper. Mr. Salwasser received numerous e-mail messages from legislators and industry representatives who were worried and angry about how the study might hurt salvage logging and Mr. Walden's bill.

In response, the dean wrote of respecting the scientific process and academic freedom. But he also wrote to a forestry-college professor that he had to respond to the criticism if he wanted the public to support the college's long-term budget needs.

Because of declining state and federal appropriations, the college faces a $4-million shortfall by 2008 in its $26-million budget. Possible solutions in the college's budget plan include raising more money from a variety of sources, including industry.

Another option listed by the college is getting more money from a statewide tax on timber sales, which provides 15 percent of the college's research funds, either by raising the tax or harvesting more timber. The tax essentially provides an incentive for a cash-strapped public university like Oregon State to support more logging.

The same can be said of Mr. Walden's bill, which would set up a federal tax on sales from salvage logging. The proceeds would go to peer-reviewed research projects, especially by universities, on the long-term effects of salvage logging and other efforts to regrow damaged forests.

Mr. Salwasser, who became dean in 2000 after a career in the U.S. Forest Service, says the college pursues research of interest to groups that finance its work but does not skew research findings accordingly.

He says he has examined his role in the controversy, which has consumed much of his time since January. He has given Mr. Donato what some colleagues consider belated congratulations for landing his paper in Science and now says it contributed "significant value" to existing knowledge. The dean has set up a committee within the college to develop guidelines to support academic freedom.

Mr. Salwasser calls the public release of his e-mail messages "gut-wrenching," adding that he wrote some off the top of his head.

Of his Congressional testimony, he says it is "appropriate" for administrators at a land-grant institution to influence policy that is relevant to their subject areas. "In hindsight, I may have crossed the line a bit into where you're actually advocating for the policy, as opposed to just advocating that what we think is known," he says.

He says he is "sorting through" whether he should have represented himself as the dean or as just another scientist when he testified. He also notes that his testimony was endorsed last year by a committee of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges that represents administrators of colleges of forestry and natural resources.

If Mr. Walden's bill is enacted - which may be doubtful given the partisan deadlock gripping Congress this year - more land-grant colleges may face similar questions involving conflicts between researchers and commodity producers. Agricultural colleges have generated many worse dust-ups, says Mr. Busch of Michigan State, who led a study of financing by an agricultural-biotechnology corporation, then called Novartis, of the plant-biology department of the University of California at Berkeley (The Chronicle, August 6, 2004). Some scientists have been fired or blacklisted for crossing their states' farmers, he says.

Such incidents have waned in recent years as land-grant universities have diversified their research portfolios beyond agriculture, Mr. Busch says. Still, state funds for research have been flat or declining, making industry's support important. And colleges of agriculture and natural resources have increasingly employed environmental scientists and sociologists whose work is seen as threatening by some commodity producers.

In 2003, for example, an economist at the University of California at Davis wrote a report supporting arguments by Brazil that American exports of cotton violated an international trade agreement. The World Trade Organization later sided with Brazil. In response, the president of the California Cotton Growers Association called on the university's donors to question their financial support and likened the economist's work to treason.

When such situations arise, it's up to the college's administration to stick up for the faculty, Mr. Busch says. "You have to tell the commodity groups that over all, they come out ahead by having this research done for them," he says, "even if occasionally something comes out that they don't particularly appreciate."