Deeply Disappointed in Creighton University

People who know me, know I am a proud alum of Creighton University. Part of my pride in Creighton is that the students aren’t generally left-wing ideologues. That’s because many of the undergrads are focused on their future careers in the health sciences or business. Yes, the Jesuits are mostly liberal but they respect free speech and critical thinking.

This week, I made my monthly appearance before the Omaha Public Power District (“OPPD”) Board. I regularly challenge the Board’s policy of net zero carbon by 2050 and its spending of billions on more expensive and unreliable solar and wind. I have repeatedly told the Board about the Center for the American Experiment’s studies of Minnesota and Wisconsin and that their net zero policies will lead to the tripling of rates and blackouts in January. In fact, in discussing the possible deaths of OPPD customer-owners during a blackout I used an appeal to emotion citing Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven. “It’s a hell of a thing, killin’ a man. Take away all he’s got, and all he’s ever gonna have.” The Board was unmoved.

My mentor and friend at Creighton University was the late Fr. John P. Schlegel, S.J. I quoted him to the OPPD Board as saying, “A Jesuit education teaches you how to think; not what to think.”

After I finished, four Creighton undergrads spoke. They demanded that the OPPD Board move up its net zero carbon goal from 2050 to 2040. This has happened in other states. They cited the regular predictions of doom and death if the US doesn’t achieve net zero carbon by 2050. They also spoke of social justice.

Following the students was their professor, W. Ryan Wishart. His livelihood is dependent upon continuing to push the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) scam. He is deeply biased. I had earlier told the OPPD Board that CAGW is the greatest scam in the history of the world. CAGW is a scam because it is a prediction about events in the distant future based upon flawed models and corrupt data. The Left and the Street want the US to spend trillions on solar and wind by 2050, but we won’t know if all that spending worked until 2100; after we are all dead.

Professor Wishart is a faculty member in Creighton’s Environmental Science and Sustainability Studies Program; a worthless field of study. He earned his doctorate from the University of Oregon where he celebrated 125 years of Marxist sociology at that fine school. He’s published the usual progressive ideological trash e.g. “Defensive Environmentalism and Radical Social Change” and “Class Capacities and Climate Politics: Coal and Conflict in the U.S. ….” He – and the OPPD Board – refuse to accept the fact there is another side to the CAGW fad that is going to bankrupt this country if it continues.   

After the meeting ended, I went up to the students and asked them to engage in a dialogue. “Hey, we are all Creighton people. Let’s talk.”  I naively thought that college students still believed in free speech and the exchange of ideas in pursuit of the truth. I wrongly assumed that Creighton students were learning how to think and not just parroting what their professors told them to think. Boy, was I wrong. They all flat-out said that they “refused to engage with me.” What?!

The students believe that “social justice” will be served if net zero carbon is achieved. Apparently, they don’t know that lower income people will be hardest hit by higher utility rates. I had just informed the OPPD Board about a report from Robert Bryce showing that California has the third highest electric rates in the country because it has too much solar and wind in its grid.

Their professor then called me a “crack pot” and somehow affiliated me with the long defunct John Birch Society. He knew calling me a Bircher was an insult, but he apparently didn’t know that it was only concerned about communism in the United States back in the 60s. I was furious to be slimed by a teacher at my alma mater. This is especially so since my family has a 100-year association with Creighton; he’s only worked at Creighton for 10 years.

I then tried to debate this arrogant know-it-all. As part of my OPPD presentation, I used the slide showing Al Gore’s prediction of no snow on Kilimanjaro in 2005 and the picture of the mountain fully snow-covered today. He refused to debate. He didn’t want to recognize any inconvenient facts that conflicted with his core religious belief in CAGW.

If I’m a “crack pot” for not believing in CAGW, then so is the Nobel Prize winner in physics (Dr. John Clauser) and the father of the hydrogen bomb (the late Dr. Edward Teller).

Free speech really seems to be dead on campuses around the nation. I’m bitterly and deeply disappointed in the instruction that Creighton students are receiving today. They are being taught cultural Marxism. I’ll always cherish my Jesuit education because it taught me how to think. I doubt I’d be a conservative today if I wasn’t educated by the Jesuits. If fact, I was a liberal in college and law school. If students today don’t know how to think, we are in big trouble as a nation.