UT Accepts Recommendations From Fracking Report
An independent review of a fracking study from UT’s Energy Institute was released yesterday, and it reports serious flaws with the study’s design and release. The study’s author and the Energy Institute director have retired or resigned.
In February, UT geologist Charles Groat and the Energy Institute, headed by Raymond Orbach, released a study titled “Fact-Based Regulation for Environmental Protection in Shale Gas Development.” The preliminary study found no direct link between hydraulic fracturing—the controversial drilling practice called fracking—and groundwater contamination.
The watchdog group Public Accountability Initiative revealed in July that Groat failed to disclose his financial ties to Plains Exploration and Productions, an oil and gas company that practices fracking. UT then convened a panel of outside experts to review the study. Groat announced his retirement in November, and following the review’s release yesterday and Orbach announced he would resign as head of the Energy Institute (but not from his faculty position).
The review cites multiple problems with the original study. “The design, management, review and release of the study … fell short of contemporary standards for scientific work,” the report says. “Primary among the shortcomings was the failure of the Principal Investigator [Groat] to disclose a conflict of interest that could have had a bearing on the credibility a reader wished to assign to the resulting work.”
In a press release, UT said it will implement all the review’s recommendations, including more stringent conflict-of-interest policies. “The University of Texas at Austin will work with the UT System Administration to conduct a compliance review for the purposes of improving internal procedures,” the release said.
Read the independent review in full here:
Fracking Study Review
Image by Erik Zumalt, Cockrell School Faculty Innovation Center.
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The University of Texas at Austin’s now demonstrated — and admitted — general lack of proper ethics oversight that extended to the behavior of its now former professor Charles Groat also very severely tainted the school’s inquiry into scientific and academic misconduct allegations against Associate Professor Mark Regnerus in the matter of The New Family Structures Study (“NFSS”).
Specifically, UT’s inquiry into Regnerus and the NFSS apparently failed to uncover, and certainly failed to acknowledge conflicts of interest as well as Regnerus’sconflicts of commitment.
The NFSS was first organized in 2010 by Regnerus’s chief funder, The Witherspoon Institute.
Witherspoon’s 2010 IRS 990 forms call the NFSS a “major accomplishment” of Witherspoon’s Program for Marriage, Family and Democracy.
In 2010, the Director of that Witherspoon program was W. Bradford Wilcox.
For the Witherspoon Institute, Wilcox recruited Regnerus to be head researcher on the NFSS. Witherspoon then gave Regnerus a planning grant. Still in his capacity as a Witherspoon Program Director, Wilcox then collaborated with Regnerus on NFSS study design.
Despite that, Regnerus in his June, 2012 NFSS article published in the Elsevier journal Social Science Research states that “the funding sources played no role at all in the design or conduct of the study, the analyses, the interpretations of the data, or in the preparation of the manuscript.”
That statement from Regnerus is plainly false. He repeated a similar untruth in his November, 2012 NFSS “Additional Analyses,” also published in Social Science Research. In his November article, Regnerus phrases the false claim this way: “No funding agency representatives were consulted about research design, survey contents, analyses, or conclusions.”
Note that UT’s documents of NFSS study disbursements show that UT did not start administering NFSS-related disbursements until 2011. That is to say, when, in 2010, Brad Wilcox – as a Witherspoon Program Director – recruited Regnerus for the NFSS for Witherspoon, and then collaborated with him on NFSS study design, Wilcox was acting as a titled Witherspoon representative, reporting and answerable to The Witherspoon Institute.
Formulating and/or changing a study design to produce a study result desired by a funding agency constitutes misconduct.
I shall return to that point shortly, but first I shall enumerate Wilcox’s additional undisclosed conflicts of interest in the matter of the NFSS; 1) Wilcox’s University of Virginia programs receive financial support from both of Regnerus’s funders, The Witherspoon Institute and The Bradley Foundation; 2) Wilcox collaborated with Regnerus on NFSS data collection; 3) Wilcox collaborated with Regnerus on NFSS data analyses; 4) Wilcox collaborated with Regnerus on NFSS interpretation; 5) A preponderance of evidence shows that Wilcox was permitted to do peer review; 6)Wilcox is a long-time associate to Regnerus; 7) Wilcox is a long-time associate to Social Science Research editor-in-chief James Wright; 8) Wilcox is on the Social Science Research editorial board.
That Wilcox is on the Social Science Research editorial board – and a long-time associate to Regnerus and to Wright – is of particular significance to Regnerus’s failure to disclose – and indeed, his actually going beyond non-disclosure and telling untruths about – Wilcox’s involvement in the NFSS.
Copies of Regnerus’s “Additional Analyses” circulated prior to the print publication of the article. Concerned about the repeated failure to disclose that Wilcox as a Witherspoon Program Director had recruited Regnerus for the NFSS for Witherspoon, and that Wilcox — still as a Witherspoon Program Director — had then collaborated with Regnerus on NFSS study design, I e-mailed editor James Wright with all of the documentation of Wilcox’s involvement. I also left Wright voice mails explaining that I wanted to know if he would be disclosing Wright’s involvement in the NFSS. Wright ignored those communications, and re-published Regnerus’s untruthful statement. I also sent Regnerus the same e-mails, but received no responses.
Regnerus thus is involved in blatant, outstanding violations of fundamental academic, and science publishing ethics involving non-disclosure of conflicts of interest.