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Community College faculty blasts gas-industry training program
The Web site for the award-winning alternative weekly, the Philadelphia City Paper.
Community College faculty blasts gas-industry training program
The Marcellus Shale Coalition and Community College of Philadelphia, with some fanfare, recently rolled out plans for a "virtual" Energy Training Center at CCP — one that would theoretically gear Philadelphians up to take on the employment boom the gas-drilling industry has been promising to bring to the state for several years now (and to accelerate the benefits the industry has been insisting will spill over to Philadelphia with striking results).
Apparently not consulted in this plan: The CCP faculty. They released a statement today protesting the move.
Without consulting the faculty, the CCP administration announced -- via an email on November 14, just one day before an opening ceremony -- that it had entered a partnership with the shale gas industry to provide "career, certificate, and academic programs in the energy field." Many in the college community learned of the fossil fuel industry connection the following day from an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer. According to the article, the Marcellus Shale Coalition, representing the fracking industry, donated $15,000 for student scholarships.
The announcement took everyone by surprise. Faculty -- even those teaching courses in related areas -- had not been consulted beforehand. "Normal college procedures for instituting new academic curricula were completely sidestepped," said Miles Grosbard, RA, head of the Department of Architecture, Design and Construction. "There is no information available about the proposed unit's mission, student audience, administrative structure, budget, facilities or educational objectives, apparently because none exists. Moreover, $15,000 is an impossibly tiny endowment to even begin a training center."
Margaret Stephens, a professor of environmental conservation and geography, pointed out, "Of course we are pro-job. We want to prepare our students for safe, fulfilling work in the expanding fields of sustainability, from architecture to sustainable transportation to renewable energy R&D to food production, distribution, and consumption."
But CCP faculty say they want no part of an environmentally destructive industry that continues to cause many documented health problems. Across the academic spectrum, informed faculty have come to the inescapable conclusion that there is no safe way to extract "natural" gas via fracking and that the practice makes for a boom-bust short-term economic bubble. "Perhaps most critical," Stephens added, "at a time that we are witnessing such catastrophic weather events related to human-induced climate change, it is short-sighted and foolhardy to promote fracking. We now know that shale gas drilling actually accelerates climate change." Thousands of municipalities nationwide and worldwide have banned or severely curtailed fracking and related heavy-industrial activity. A growing movement among colleges and universities is calling for complete divestment from fossil fuel industries.
Comments (3)
Well, now that the Community College Professors in Philadelphia have weighed in on fracking, I guess "the conclusion is inescapable that there is no safe way to extract natural gas."
I am sure a lot of high quality research went into that statement.
Myself, I think the conclusion is inescapable that if you want to teach leftist diatribe rather than useful job skills, you should stick to an ivy league university where the students don't need to work for a living afterwards.
How about this, "If you want to teach people useless leftist diatribe, stick to a real university.— PhillyNetTaxPayer- U mad bro? — jr1
- U mad bro? — jr1
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