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It appears that the parents make the rather grim decision to kill off the males early and focus on keeping the females alive long enough so that they can escape the rising waters. There's a certain grim logic to all this, and the species has evolved to make the choice easier - males and females chicks are born as slightly different shades of gray, making it easier for the Eclectus parrots to identify which ones are worth saving.
Via Current Biology. Image by Doug Janson on Wikimedia.
Dennis Zine en Liberal LA Councilmen Consider Blocking Koch Buyout of LA Times <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p> The newspaper industry as a whole may be dying, but the liberal Democratic Los Angeles city council knows that an editorially-liberal broadsheet is invaluable to its continued monopoly on power. There are actually L.A. councilmen who want to explore using the city's pension funds to prevent the Los Angeles Times from being bought out by the conservative Koch brothers. Catherine Saillant of the Los Angeles Times explained in <a href=",0,7766627.story">an April 30 story </a>that:</p> </div></div></div> Fri, 03 May 2013 21:35:07 +0000 Matt Vespa 60140 at
As the global economic downturn grinds on, more companies are acknowledging that Labour costs aren’t always the most important factor when deciding where to build their next factory.
This column argues that, in times of recession, some companies find that bringing their business home can give them a competitive edge.
While politicians argue strategies to create jobs in the faltering global economy, the debate around offshoring has intensified.
Once considered a clear competitive advantage in the fast-changing global market, manufacturers rushed to replace domestic labor forces with lower-cost workers in emerging markets.
By 2002–03, about a quarter to half of the manufacturing companies in Western Europe were involved in offshore production (Dachs et al 2006). And by 2008, more than 50% of US companies had a corporate offshoring strategy (Minter 2009).
Recently, though, many of the perceived offshoring advantages have been called into question. First, the sourcing costs from emerging economies have been rising rapidly. For example, as of mid-2010, many Chinese firms were facing labour shortages and were forced to boost wages to attract qualified workers (Plunkett Research 2010).
Second, the global commodity price index has risen significantly (Archstone Consulting 2009). This has led to more expensive transportation costs, particularly as a result of higher oil prices, as well as higher production costs. Third, the economic recession that started at the end of 2007 has had a severe impact on the market. Consumers are more cautious in spending, and firms are seeking new strategies to retain customers (Dodes 2011).
So it should not come as a surprise that more US manufacturers are ‘reshoring’, ’onshoring’ and ‘backshoring’. General Electric announced last year that it is moving some of its appliance manufacturing from China to Louisville, Kentucky. NCR Corp. is pulling all of its ATM machine production from China, India, and Hungary back to a facility in Columbus, Georgia, in order to customise products and get them to clients faster. In their announcements, these firms emphasised that by being closer to the market, they can better understand the market and are able to respond quickly to market changes.
Finding balance
As these industry examples illustrate, the tradeoff between cost and flexibility can be quite involved and difficult to evaluate. It now appears that the labour-cost benefits gained from offshoring might not be sufficient to cover the lost flexibility under many circumstances. So before making any sourcing decisions, firms at the crossroads need to understand the business environment as well as the competitor’s sourcing strategy. The purpose of our recent paper (Wu and Zhang 2011) is to investigate the underlying factors that affect the sourcing trend and provide insights to firms on strategic sourcing decisions in a competitive setting.
Our paper studies a two-stage sourcing game in which competing firms could choose between sourcing internationally (call this the efficient sourcing strategy due to low production costs) and sourcing domestically (call this the responsive sourcing strategy due to short lead times). We first identify the point of equilibrium between the two sourcing strategies. Then we examine how that equilibrium shifts based on key parameters. We find three key factors that influence a shift from efficient sourcing to responsive sourcing: consumer demand, market size, and supplier costs.
Consumer demand
All things being equal, when demand is relatively stable, most companies look for the lowest cost option, which usually translates to offshoring. As demand fluctuates, though, as in the recent recession, companies need to respond faster to shifting consumer sentiments.
Onshore suppliers give companies greater flexibility because they don’t have to deal with overseas transportation, which means they can place orders much closer to the selling season. As a result the firm can have a better forecast of demand information. It also gives the firm more time to understand the needs of the customer and integrate the updated product specification required by the customer into the production at the last minute.
Because the major benefit of sourcing from a responsive, or onshore, supplier is to obtain more accurate demand information, that advantage disappears when there is no demand uncertainty. At that point, the competitive advantage rests solely on cost efficiency. This implies that for products with highly predictable demand, offshoring is still a useful strategy.
Market size
After that, firms need to consider market size. Companies targeting smaller markets need to stick closer to home because competition is more intense and the firms’ selling quantities are low. That makes accurate demand information more valuable because being able to respond quickly to their customers outweighs additional manufacturing costs. This may partly explain why the backshoring phenomenon became prominent during the recent recession.
Middle-market companies can benefit from diversifying their sourcing strategies by balancing the lower cost of offshoring with the increased flexibility of using domestic, or onshore, suppliers to fill short-term needs. Larger markets, though, mean bigger orders, so companies will use efficient, or low-cost, sourcing whenever possible.
Supplier cost
Finally, any change in supplier costs can affect sourcing decisions. Naturally, when an offshore supplier’s price rises you would expect to find more companies preferring the convenience of domestic suppliers. What we found, though, is that when there is an equal cost increase for both domestic and offshore suppliers, more companies still place greater value on being able to respond quickly to their clients. The rising cost of commodities and the commensurate increase in backshoring by US companies is an example of this phenomenon.
Makers of innovative products in markets where tastes change quickly will value supply flexibility and are more likely to “backshore”. But for companies that rely heavily on low manufacturing costs, backshoring will decrease, although the countries from which they source may change. As wages increase in China and other developing economies, businesses will seek lower-cost manufacturing sites elsewhere.
Archstone Consulting (2009), “Does offshoring still make sense?” by Ferreira, J and L Prokopets, 17 February.
Dachs, B, B Ebersberger, S Kinkel, BR Waser (2006), “Offshoring of production – a European perspective”, European Manufacturing Survey.
Dodes, R (2011), “At Macy’s, a makeover on service”, Wall Street Journal. 11 April.
Minter, S (2009), “Offshoring by U.S. companies doubles”, Industry Week,19 August.
Plunkett Research (2010), “Introduction to the outsourcing and offshoring industry”. Tech. rep., Plunkett Research, Ltd.
Wu, Xiaole and Fuqiang Zhang (2011), “Efficient Supplier or Responsive Supplier? An Analysis of Sourcing Strategies under Competition”, presented at the China Business Initiative conference, sponsored by the Chazen Institute of International Business at Columbia Business School.
This post originally appeared at VoxEu.
This article originally appeared at VoxEU. Copyright 2014.
“AMERICAN manufacturing has never been in more trouble than it is now.” Thus the glum introduction to an official report on competitiveness released in 1990, the last time America hosted a G7 summit. Its moroseness matched the nation's mood. Neurosis about the strength of Japan; gloom about the deficit; woe and decline on every side.
How times change. The country that presides over this year's rich-world gathering in Denver is feeling triumphant, even euphoric. “Is this a wonder economy or what?” asked Business Week. “On top of the world” chirped Newsweek. Notwithstanding signs of a slowdown in the second quarter of this year, the economy has been growing faster for longer than most economists thought sustainable. Unemployment has fallen well below the rate at which wage pressures have traditionally started to grip. And inflation is nowhere in sight. Producer prices fell for the fifth consecutive month in May, the longest string of declines since the 1950s.
Some back-slapping is in order, for sure. But today's economic success has also unleashed a Panglossian optimism, and that is more dangerous. A growing chorus of pundits, investors and economists argue that the good times are here—for good. They claim that such factors as globalisation and the rise of information technology have changed the way the economy works, so that old constraints on growth no longer apply. Instead, America can look forward to a prolonged period of prosperity, with both inflation and business cycles tamed.
The stakes in this debate are high. If the new conventional wisdom is correct, America does indeed face a rosy future. If it is not, unfounded confidence could endanger the economy's achievements so far. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to pin down exactly what is supposed to have changed. Believers in the “new economy” speak grandly but vaguely of productivity revolutions or the “loss of corporate pricing power”; they point to tumbling computer prices and the growth of the Internet as indisputable evidence that the economy is dancing to a different tune.
Beyond anecdote, their optimism rests on two main arguments. The first is that America's potential growth rate is much higher than conventional wisdom suggests, because productivity is much higher than official statistics measure. The second is that, regardless of productivity improvements, inflationary pressures are much weaker (or even non-existent). Global competition means that capacity can be pushed harder and unemployment sent ever lower. Do these propositions make sense?
There is some truth to the productivity claim. According to official statistics (and notwithstanding the small surge in the first quarter of this year), America's productivity growth during the 1990s has been as paltry as it was during the previous two decades, an average rise of around 1% a year. These official numbers have big and well-documented shortcomings. Productivity in services, the largest and fastest-growing part of the economy, is notoriously badly measured.
Moreover, using alternative gauges of productivity gives starkly different results. Edward Yardeni, chief economist at Deutsche Morgan Grenfell, points out that the growth in firms' real sales per employee used to rise in step with productivity growth. But since 1986 or so, and particularly in recent years, they have diverged. In 1995, for instance, real sales per employee rose 10% while non-farm productivity rose only 0.2%. The biggest gains are in new-economy sectors such as high tech and communications. These figures have problems—in particular, the divergence might reflect the outsourcing of production—but they provide some evidence of higher-than-measured productivity growth.
Few economists would disagree that the real economy may be growing faster than official numbers suggest. At issue is whether the discrepancy keeps increasing. Moreover, if America's recent growth primarily reflects rising productivity, it is not clear why unemployment continues to fall. The drop in joblessness suggests that at least part of America's GDP growth comes from more labour input rather than higher output per worker.
Statistics bear this out: a large part of America's growth in the past year did indeed come from more people working, as well as working harder. Between the first quarter of 1996 and the first quarter of 1997 the number of Americans with a job grew by 2.4%, far more than the traditional annual job-growth rate of 1.4%. Moreover, the average number of hours worked each week also rose by 1.2%, again well above trend. Add growth in employment and hours worked to the official estimate of productivity growth (1%) and you more than account for the 4.1% rise in GDP. (The numbers do not add up exactly because they come from different statistical sources.) This does not prove that there has been no rise in productivity, but simply shows that much recent growth has come from getting more people to work, and persuading them to work longer hours.
And that is exactly what worries mainstream economists. Fast growth based on unusually high employment growth cannot continue forever. At some point, they fear, the unemployment rate will fall below the non-accelerating inflation rate (NAIRU) and wage-inflation will rise. Indeed, many reckon it has already done so.
Moreover, they point out, America's labour force grew remarkably quickly last year, far faster than its population. Several factors lay behind this. A buoyant economy may have lured back some people, particularly women, who had given up looking for work; welfare reform is forcing poorer women, who may have relied on a federal cheque, to find a job; and changes in immigration laws have prompted a sharp rise in the number of Latinos entering the labour force. But these supply increases are probably temporary: once employment growth stabilises, fast job growth would mean bringing the unemployment rate down further, which increases pressure on wages. At that point either corporate profits must be squeezed, or firms must pass on their higher costs through higher prices.
The new-economy crowd insists this is nonsense: inflation is dead, and the concept of a natural rate of unemployment outdated. In the new economy, firms cannot simply raise their prices: if they do, they will quickly lose out in a global market where firms and consumers can choose their suppliers at will. Yet, in fact, the United States is not terribly globalised: imports and exports still make up a relatively small share of GDP. Most of America's output is in goods and services that cannot easily be bought and sold across borders. For the price of a haircut, say, or a meal out, the globalisation argument is irrelevant.
A more subtle argument is that the pressures of globalisation and corporate restructuring have allowed American firms to push capacity further. New techniques for managing inventories, for instance, prevent the kind of involuntary build-up of stocks that used to make for large swings in output. In a more integrated global economy, companies can switch to foreign suppliers more easily. In short, the old speed limits may no longer hold.
There is probably some truth to this; but it would be foolish to push the argument too far. The capacity of the global economy is not infinite. Much of the weak price pressure faced by American firms comes from the fact that other large industrial economies have been growing sluggishly in recent years: once they pick up, commodity prices, for instance, may be under more pressure than they are now. Moreover, the strong dollar—a factor that has helped depress import prices—need not be a permanent phenomenon. If any of these temporary fillips subsides, American firms could well find their costs rising fast.
It is more likely, however, that pressure will first occur in labour markets. Historical relationships between unemployment and inflation imply that these pressures should already be evident. It is, of course, true that the NAIRU—estimates of which have never been made with enormous precision—may indeed have fallen: an ageing workforce, greater worker insecurity and the changing nature of employment contracts could all have brought it down. A lower NAIRU, however, is not the same as no NAIRU. More important, the new-economy people forget that overall labour costs have risen more slowly than wages because the cost of non-wage benefits, such as health insurance, has barely budged. This will surely not last for ever.
In short, the optimists have a point, but the danger is in pushing it too far. America's economy is undergoing some striking changes; but it has also benefited from a plethora of temporary (positive) shocks. Cheerfulness is appropriate; euphoria should be held in check.
Click photo to enlarge
This image released by History shows Travis Fimmel as Ragnar, center, in a scene from "Vikings," premiering Sunday, March 3 on History.
ASHFORD, Ireland—If historical fiction guru Michael Hirst has his way, a legendary Viking raider named Ragnar soon will conquer North America on behalf of the History channel.
History's ambitious Dark Ages drama "Vikings," debuting Sunday after five months of filming in Ireland, dramatizes the myth-cloaked story of Ragnar Lothbrok, leader of a Viking people typically depicted as horn-helmeted brutes.
Here's one pointed clue that "Vikings" aims to smash a few stereotypes along with English skulls: There's not a horned head in sight because real Vikings never actually wore them.
This lavishly produced nine-parter, the biggest production ever commissioned by History with a reported budget of $40 million, seeks to get viewers rooting for the Norsemen even as they butcher defenseless Christians and loot their way through Europe. With a cast including Gabriel Byrne, the series debuts on History Sunday at 10 p.m. EST after another big History miniseries, "The Bible."
"It's always been in the background of my mind to do a Viking project," said Hirst, whose reputation as a master of history-based drama has grown from his days as screenwriter of 1998's film "Elizabeth" to his creation of the 2007-10 Showtime series "The Tudors" about the life, times and ill-fated brides of Henry VIII.
Speaking to The Associated Press during the final weeks of shooting, in a rain-soaked ash forest in the Wicklow hills south of Dublin, Hirst said he loved poring over the history of an ill-understood person or period, then weaving it into compelling entertainment.
Hirst, the showrunner and executive producer of "Vikings" as well as its sole writer, found working with 8th-century Scandinavian warriors a liberating experience because, while there's such rich legend in Norse culture, there's simply no written history from the illiterate Vikings' point of view.
"By definition, not as much is known about the Dark Ages. This is particularly true of the Vikings who were pagans and didn't write anything down," he said as, in the distance, actors on horseback worked on a scene of Ragnar taking his son on a mission to a magical tree, one facet of Norse religious belief. "Because not a huge amount is known, that gives me some liberty. But I like working from historical material. I always start projects by reading as much research as possible."
"Vikings" employs much of the same Irish talent pool that crafted "The Tudors," including production designer Tom Conroy and costume designer Joan Bergin, both Emmy winners for their "Tudors" creativity. It's the first production to use Ireland's brand-new Ashford Studios, where Conroy oversaw the construction of a Norse temple to the gods of Odin, Thor and Loki using design ideas distilled from trips to Scandinavian archaeology museums.
On the nearby shores of Lough Tay, the filmmakers set the actors loose on a 56-foot reconstruction of a dragon-headed Viking longboat. Wicklow's relatively gentle, sloping hills did have to be manipulated with CGI technology into cliff-faced, snow-capped fjords. But other scenes of Irish rural beauty, such as the Powerscourt waterfall, feature prominently without alteration.
For all the show's stunning scenery and attention to production detail, its success or failure will hinge on the appeal of its characters. They may each be cleverly based on actual Viking warriors and deities, but that won't mean much to an audience that mostly doesn't know a Valkyrie from Valhalla.
The biggest-name cast members are Gabriel Byrne ("In Treatment," "The Usual Suspects"), who portrays a ruthless chieftain threatened by Ragnar's ambition and popularity, and Jessalyn Gilsig ("Nip/Tuck"; Mrs. Schuester on "Glee") as his mercilessly power-lusting wife.
"Vikings" offers more of a showcase for a quartet of lesser-known actors: Clive Standen, a 6-foot-2 Englishman whose skills in kickboxing, sword fighting and stunt work complement his portrayal of Ragnar's hard-fighting brother Rollo; George Blagden as the doe-eyed Saxon monk whom Ragnar kidnaps, enslaves and ultimately befriends; Gustaf Skarsgaard, a son of Sweden's best-known acting family, as a boat-building genius and uber-eccentric named Floki; and perhaps above all Canadian-born Katheryn Winnick as Ragnar's gorgeous warrior wife, who in real life has two martial-arts black belts and looks more than able to fight alongside the men as a "shield maiden."
But oh yes, Ragnar: Who's he?
In the production's biggest gamble, it's an Australian actor named Travis Fimmel, who shot to magazine and billboard fame a decade ago as Calvin Klein's most highly paid male underwear model. His acting career since has been humble. Interviewed on set between takes, he punctuates every other sentence with "mate" and parrys each question with a quip.
"Nobody knows me. I'm just a guy with a silly haircut," said Fimmel, who for his role has shaved his hair into a Mohawk topped by an artificial braided ponytail, and a tattoo of a raven on one side of his mostly naked scalp. But just one tattoo, he kids: "It's a budget thing. Can't afford two."
There's no doubt Fimmel looks fine on horseback or skewering an enemy with his broadsword. He's a confident physical performer and—more Fimmel self-deprecation here—suggests he likes the sword fighting best "because you don't have to remember lines while you're doing it."
But it's an open question as to whether he has the dramatic chops to make audiences believe in his declared quest for knowledge, riches and power.
Fimmel himself sounds unsure when asked if "Vikings" will win enough of a following to fight into a second season. "No idea man, it's up to the audience and the suits," he said.
But Hirst sees a complex soul in Fimmel, whose self-made audition tape persuaded Hirst to dump another better-established—and unnamed—actor who was within hours of signing on as Ragnar.
"I wanted someone who can fight, but who has depth in their eyes, because this guy Ragnar's a thinker, not just an action man. We were getting desperate. We nearly went with someone else. We nearly made do," he said. "But Travis has that depth and stillness I was looking for. He's going to be a star, no doubt about it."
While the first season is expected to end with Ragnar triumphant versus Byrne's earl, Hirst has picked a legend with legs: The real-life Ragnar spent decades expanding Viking sea routes and pushing armies all the way to a besieged Paris.
"Obviously I want to do four or five seasons of 'Vikings,' but I already know it's a better show than 'Tudors.' Everything has worked. And it just looks astonishing," Hirst said. "Whether it's a hit or not is in the lap of the gods. Which is a pretty appropriate place for it to be."
Does the Constitution really protect a right to "academic freedom"?
The law, lawyers, and the court.
June 1 2010 6:19 PM
Jefferson v. Cuccinelli
Last week the University of Virginia decided to fight a sweeping subpoena served upon the institution in late April. State Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli subpoenaed documents in connection with five grants awarded to Michael Mann—a former UVA climate-change scientist who now teaches at Penn State. Cuccinelli is using a state fraud statute to demand thousands of e-mails between Mann and climate-change scientists around the world. The request was both broad and unprecedented. So the university filed a petition to quash the subpoena on various grounds. Academics across the country have raised alarms, signing petitions and urging Cuccinelli to back off, claiming that this novel use of prosecutorial power to investigate climate science in the academy constitutes a threat to free inquiry. (Disclosure: Richard Schragger was the principal author of such a letter from the UVA law faculty.) These letters and petitions often invoke the First Amendment and quote the U.S. Supreme Court to assert that the Constitution protects "academic freedom."
Does it? What precisely is "academic freedom," and why would the Constitution protect it? Who can assert "academic freedom"—individual faculty members or the university as a whole? What is the scope of the right, and does it apply to faculty at state universities or those who receive government grants? The Supreme Court has never really answered these questions. UVA v. Cuccinelli would be a good time to do so—if the case ever gets that far.
We can start with what we do know. First, the phrase "academic freedom" appears nowhere in the Constitution. The First Amendment mentions speech, assembly, petitioning, press, and religion but not universities. Still, the Supreme Court has alluded to the special role of universities time and time again. In perhaps the most important academic-freedom case, Sweezy v. New Hampshire, decided in 1957, the high court stated that "the essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self-evident." In 1967, in Keyishian v. Board of Regents, the court declared that "the university is a traditional sphere of free expression ... fundamental to the function of society." Writing for the court, Justice William Brennan stated, "Our Nation is deeply committed to safeguarding academic freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned. * That freedom is therefore a special concern of the First Amendment. ..."
Second, despite the court's rhetoric, it has never pinned down exactly what academic freedom means. Much to the frustration of scholars and academics, the decisions that invoke academic freedom range widely. Some cases relate to the Red Scare of the 1950s, when teachers were required to take loyalty oaths, or professors (like Paul Sweezy) were investigated for "subversive activities." Other cases involved the rights of state employees—again often primary- or secondary-school teachers—to associate with others on their own time, or comment on matters of "public concern" outside the classroom. Yet another group of cases concern whether the government can control the speech of public employees, organizations, or agencies that receive government funding.
But none of these cases was resolved on the basis of academic freedom directly. In some cases, the court invoked the due-process clause or freedom of speech and association. In other cases, the court upheld a government regulation but observed that the regulation did not implicate the "special" role of the university. As one legal scholar has written, "Lacking definition or a guiding principle, the doctrine [of academic freedom] floats in the law, picking up decisions as a hull does barnacles."
In other words, the assertion of "academic freedom" raises more questions than it resolves. For example, who is protected under the umbrella of academic freedom? In Sweezy, Justice Frankfurter, writing for himself and Justice Harlan, emphasized "the four essential freedoms of the university—to determine for itself on academic grounds who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study." Frankfurter's concept of academic freedom seems to protect the university (but not individual faculty members) from outside government interference. But there are also hints of an individual right sprinkled throughout the court's decisions.
On the other hand, it can't be true that the university or its faculty employees can do absolutely anything they want. Universities are subject to federal and state laws, including employment and nondiscrimination laws. A faculty member can't steal from the university or make false statements to government officials or embezzle funds. The Supreme Court has held, for example, that a university can be required to turn over documents related to a faculty member's tenure denial and her charge that she was the subject of discrimination.
The situation gets still messier when you're dealing with public universities, where faculty are "employees" of the state, or receive state funding. The Cuccinelli subpoena actually raises both issues, since he claims to be investigating "fraud" in government grants at a state university. Does being a state employee or receiving government funds give the government the authority to dictate or regulate academic behavior? Cuccinelli certainly thinks so—he argues that he is well within his rights to challenge the misuse of state monies. And surely the university (and by extension, Virginia) can condition professors' employment on the professors acting and performing in certain ways—can't it?
Here is where the Supreme Court's notion of academic freedom starts to have some actual bite—despite its conceptual messiness. While a state university can adopt policies that must be followed by its academic employees, the governments' regulation must have limits. If the faculty members are just state employees—just like any other state employees—everything they do or say or produce would be "owned" by the state, would essentially be the "speech" of the state, and would be under the state's legitimate control. Virtually no one believes faculty employees are just like every other state employee. Most of us would agree that they engage in a particular enterprise; one that can serve its important public function only by being independent of the government.
J. Harvie Wilkinson, on the Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, whose chambers are just down the street from UVA, made this very observation in a case challenging a law prohibiting state employees from accessing sexually explicit material on state-owned computers. Wilkinson observed that faculty at a state university are certainly "state employees," but "these particular employees are hired for the very purpose of inquiring into, reflecting upon, and speaking out on matters of public concern. A faculty is employed professionally to test ideas and propose solutions, to deepen knowledge and refresh perspectives. ... In research and writing university professors are not state mouthpieces—they speak mainly for themselves."
In other words, the core and central enterprise of academic faculty in the university is to exercise First Amendment rights—rights guaranteed to everyone by the Constitution. Academic faculty happen to be exercising those rights as part of their job, but that does not make those rights any less worthy of protection. In performing their core functions, faculty are always engaged in the process of free inquiry. And free inquiry is the central project of the university—the university can't exist without it, as Thomas Jefferson well understood when he founded the University of Virginia.
Whatever the judicial doctrine of academic freedom may mean, at its heart it must protect those exercising core First Amendment rights—like researching, writing, speaking, and teaching. If government officials are allowed to dictate how the faculty exercises those rights, they are surely impinging on free speech. Indeed, the government impinges most directly on free speech by threatening to prosecute faculty for academic work that is wrong, shoddy, incomplete, mistaken, or fraudulent.
And this is precisely what Cuccinelli has asserted. He says he issued the subpoena because he wants to explore allegations that Michael Mann falsified data in his scholarship. Despite the fact that multiple academic inquiries into Mann's research have vindicated him, it's important to understand what the attorney general seeks to do here: Cuccinelli is not alleging fiscal fraud—he isn't saying Mann used state funds to buy a Mercedes or finance trips to Aruba. Instead, Cuccinelli is investigating the scientific scholarship to make sure it meets his standard of academic integrity.
Using the threat of criminal or civil sanction to pursue "academic fraud" is the paradigm First Amendment case. Academic fraud is essentially what the authorities charged Galileo with—when he dared question the conventional religious wisdom that the sun revolved around the earth. It is what prosecutors alleged when they threatened academics during the Red Scare. And it is exactly what Cuccinelli is alleging here. The UVA subpoena violates both the individual rights of academics engaged in the exercise of speech rights on matters of public concern and the autonomy rights of the university to act independently from the government, as Frankfurter described in Sweezy.
"Academic fraud" is too easily used to suppress ideas that the authorities do not want to hear—in one case, the earth revolves around the sun; in another case, the earth is warming. It may be that what academics say is wrong, it may be that their methodologies are faulty, it may even be that they are twisting the evidence or making stuff up. But the government, through its prosecutors, cannot say anything about that. The First Amendment requires that we tolerate lots of speech that is plain wrong or mistaken—the university itself is designed to permit, even encourage, that kind of speech.
UVA v. Cuccinelli is in its opening stages—right now it consists of a petition filed in state court to set aside a civil investigative demand. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court might someday take this case and clarify the core meaning of academic freedom once and for all.
It probably won't, and the reason it won't only illustrates how off-base Cuccinelli's subpoena is. Cuccinelli chose to seek the Mann documents under the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act (FATA), but as UVA's lawyers pointed out last week in opposing the subpoena, Cuccinelli never explained (as required under the law) why he was seeking these documents. The act requires a fraud on Virginia citizens, yet all but one grant that Cuccinelli seeks to investigate are federal. Worse still, the state grant was made before the Virginia FATA became effective. This is not the first time Cuccinelli's hasty lawyering leads one to wonder whether he seeks legal outcomes or political ones.
The Virginia fraud statute is clearly the wrong vehicle for prosecuting science, and it's likely a court will deem the subpoena invalid before anyone gets near the big issue of academic freedom. That's too bad. Because a judicial decision in this case could finally clarify that basic scholarly inquiry is at the core of the First Amendment. And it would put a constitutional cherry on top of Thomas Jefferson's lifelong ideal of free inquiry. In the matter of Jefferson vs. Cuccinelli, we'd put our money on Mr. J. any day.
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Correction, June 2, 2010: This article originally misquoted Justice Brennan's opinion as stating that academic freedom is of "transcendent freedom"; the phrase Brennan used was "transcendent value." (Return to the corrected sentence.)
Dahlia Lithwick writes about the courts and the law for Slate
Richard C. Schragger is Perre Bowen Professor and Barron F. Black Research Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law.
at least 40 dead in hospital bombing

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