Law School Banned Clinic From Talking About Studies That Made Governor Sad
If Tulane's Environmental Law Clinic has been a little quiet lately, there's a reason. The post Law School Banned Clinic From Talking About Studies That Made Governor Sad appeared first on Above the Law.
Kimberly Terrell resigned from her role as director of community engagement at Tulane’s Environmental Law Clinic after law school administrators slapped a gag order on the clinic doing any “engaging” of the “community” over its work.
The Environmental Law Clinic represents numerous residents of Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” a long stretch of riverside communities suffering from industries using the Mississippi River as a toxic dumping ground for decades. The clinic also produces research detailing the impact of the pollution on residents, having found both statistically higher cancer rates and incidence of premature and underweight births. While suffering the brunt of the damage, the Black community in Louisiana also got significantly fewer jobs in the petrochemical industry when controlled for training and education according to the clinic’s studies. All the negatives, few of the positives.
As one might imagine, the state’s Republican government and big-pocketed bosses don’t appreciate anyone pointing out the damage being done by unchecked industry, but no one expected a private law school to cater to those complaints.
Marcilynn Burke, dean of Tulane’s law school, wrote in a May 4 email to clinic staff that Tulane University President Michael Fitts worried the clinic’s work threatened to tank support for the university’s long-sought efforts to redevelop New Orleans’ historic Charity Hospital as part of a downtown expansion.
“Elected officials and major donors have cited the clinic as an impediment to them lending their support to the university generally and this project specifically,” Burke wrote.
School administrators shouldn’t have to deal with elected officials abusing the public trust to lean on private schools to stifle academic work, but those are the breaks. But holding the line, sticking up for the academic mission, and maybe making a few hardball threats about making a big deal about killing the new home for the public health school just to protect donor egos… that’s the job. What’s not part of the job is downplaying cancer research because the governor’s office is sad.
For what it’s worth, the governor’s office said they never threatened to withhold funding, which sounds like the sort of denial an office makes when they’ve very carefully never explicitly said a particular set of words.
In her resignation letter, Terrell wrote that she had been told the governor “threatened to veto” any state funding for the expansion project unless Tulane’s president “did something” about the clinic.
The AP report suggests that what the school “did” about the clinic was impose a gag order on “all external communications” from social media posts to interviews without administration approval. The administration then blanket denied all requests.
In a May 21 audio recording obtained by the AP, Provost Robin Forman said that when Tulane leadership met with elected officials in April, they were pressed as to why “‘Tulane has taken a stand on the chemical industry as harming communities’,” and this “left people feeling embarrassed and uncomfortable.”
You know what can be embarrassing and uncomfortable? Dying slowly of cancer while state officials cover it up. The AP collected so many smoking guns for this report that they should be immediately shipping them to our allies in Ukraine. They got the dean citing the university president questioning how this research was connected to representing clients… when the research is cited in the court filings!
It’s definitely bad that a private school is on marionette strings held by the governor, but at least as a private actor, Tulane is free to make its own bad decisions. The real danger to higher education is when public institutions become propaganda factories for the government, an ever-growing risk as conservatives starve public schools of resources and then come for the foreign student tuition that many use to fill the gap. A more dependent education system coupled with government officials willing to abuse their offices makes a noxious cocktail.
On par with drinking out of the Mississippi.
Tulane scientist resigns citing university censorship of pollution and racial disparity research [AP]
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
The post Law School Banned Clinic From Talking About Studies That Made Governor Sad appeared first on Above the Law.
