A6 The BulleTin • Sunday, January 31, 2021
EDITORIALS & OPINIONS
AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER
Heidi Wright
Gerry O’Brien
Richard Coe
Publisher
Editor
Editorial Page Editor
Stop trying to
shoot down
OSU-Cascades
O
SU-Cascades has been a veritable higher education
rocketship. When most institutions across the country
were struggling even before the pandemic, enrollment
and excellence at OSU-Cascades keep going up.
So we were bewildered to read an
assertion from state Rep. Paul Evans,
D-Monmouth. He responded in a
column on Friday to an editorial we
wrote earlier this month criticizing
his House Bill 2888.
His bill takes a shot at the rocket.
He would make OSU-Cascades
less attractive to students, by strip-
ping it of the educational strength
it gets from its connection to OSU
and making it a separate institution.
Want to take that doctoral program
in physical therapy OSU-Cascades
has planned? Evans says no.
Evans made several assertions in
his column. One that stood out was
about the growth of OSU-Cascades.
He said the growth at OSU-Cascades
has happened without regard for the
need of the system and despite the
fact that a Higher Education Coor-
dinating Commission study said the
capacity was not needed.
We’ll quote a substantial passage
of his column to be more fair. You
also can read the whole column and
our earlier editorial if you missed
them at bendbulletin.com.
Evans wrote: “...As a career college
educator, I still support a campus
in Bend. However, over the past six
years OSU-Cascades has expanded
in scale, scope and size. It has done
so at the expense of existing univer-
sities; it has done so without regard
for system need (the Higher Edu-
cation Coordinating Commission
study concluded there was no need
for additional capacity)....”
That is not really what the HECC
study said. It does ask a question
about the future role of OSU-Cas-
cades in the university system. Is it
to be — “an extension of OSU and
its mission with the attendant needs
for research space as well as instruc-
tional space, or is it a regional in-
structional institution...”
The study then goes on to clearly
state there is a need for additional
capacity at OSU-Cascades — 21,478
square feet. Enrollment has even
gone up since that projection was
made.
To be fair to Evans, there is also
a section of the plan that says fu-
ture enrollment in Oregon’s system
could be handled with no additional
buildings anywhere. But that would
mean students who need or want to
be able to go to college close to home
in Central Oregon and elsewhere
might be denied the opportunity.
The school near home may not have
the capacity to serve their needs.
House Bill 2888 has been assigned
to the House Education Committee.
It’s not rocket science to figure out
the bill is full of holes.
Bend begins needed look
at reducing wildfire risk
W
ildfires killed 9 people, de-
stroyed more than 4,000
homes and burned more
than 1 million acres in Oregon in
2020. And in Bend it should be a
wake up call that one very bad igni-
tion and one bad wind could make
for a terrible tragedy.
The city has formed a Wild-
fire Resiliency Steering Commit-
tee to work out some things Bend
might do. It had its first meeting
last week. The meeting was mostly
organizational.
But the committee did talk about
potentially making code changes
to protect lives and property from
wildfire risk. The committee has a
wide range of representation from
public safety to representatives from
the business community.
One issue that may prove conten-
tious is the balancing act between
tree preservation and fire preven-
tion. Many people in Bend are al-
ready concerned that too many of
Bend trees are being cut down to
make way for more buildings. What
might any changes mean for trees or
other things green in Bend?
The discussion never waded too
deeply into any possible actions.
The goal, though, is to come up with
possible code changes and/or make
recommendations to the Bend City
Council by June or July.
Doing nothing would be playing
with fire.
Editorials reflect the views of The Bulletin’s editorial board, Publisher Heidi Wright, Editor
Gerry O’Brien and Editorial Page Editor Richard Coe. They are written by Richard Coe.
What does qualitative community
development look and feel like?
BY CYLVIA HAYES
M
y neighborhood running
trail crosses busy Reed
Market Road and follows
a stretch of open-flowing irrigation
canal. It skirts a field and remnant
forest including many huge several
hundred-year-old ponderosa Pines,
usually teeming with ducks, geese,
hawks, and Kingfishers. Last summer,
the place was home to flocks of lesser
goldfinch and cedar waxwings. Once,
I ran up on a large four-point buck ly-
ing in the tall grass, and he jumped up
and shook his antlers. The dog and I
gave him wide berth.
A few weeks ago, I went for a run
and found that the field and forest
were gone. The huge old trees gone.
The birds gone. No deer in sight. In-
stead, just bulldozers and giant track
hoes leveling and flattening the earth,
making space for more houses. We
call this development. In fact, we call
all human construction development.
It’s a misnomer. There is a qualita-
tive difference between development
and growth. Development is about
making things better not just bigger.
Growth is just growth.
Central Oregon is in high demand
and at a crucial crossroad. The stag-
gering construction rate does add
prosperity and opportunity for some.
However, the negative trade-offs are
rarely taken seriously.
There are two layers to the expan-
sion of the human-built environment
that are deeply concerning. The more
obvious is the erosion of quality of
GUEST COLUMN
life as traffic mush-
rooms, urban wild-
life vanish, noise
pollution ratchets
higher and the out-
door recreation op-
portunities we loved
Hayes
are no longer avail-
able. That’s all hap-
pening in Central Oregon.
The bigger, more serious issue, is
the scale of human spread, and im-
pact, on the planet as a whole. There
is a staggering trend under way that
few know about, though every one
of us should, if we want a livable, vi-
brant planet. According to a landmark
2018 study by the National Academy
of Sciences, by weight, humans and
our livestock now make up 96% of all
mammal life on the planet. Humans
account for 36% of the biomass of all
mammals and our domesticated live-
stock, mostly cows and pigs, account
for the other 60%. This means that
human expansion and our mass cul-
tivation of livestock has reduced wild
mammals to only 4% of all mamma-
lian life on Earth.
Similarly, the biomass of poultry is
three times higher than that of wild
birds. This is a profound reshaping of
the composition of living creatures on
our planet.
Between cities and suburbs, live-
stock facilities, grazing lands, agri-
cultural sites, fisheries, fishing vessels
and off-shore oil platforms, the hu-
man-built environment has pushed
wild creatures and habitats to the
margins of the planet. Physical space
on this planet is finite resource, and at
some point, humanity must stop the
displacement of non-human, wild na-
ture. Earth is not going to be a great
place for humans if there’s no place on
it for non-humans.
There are many places in the world
where humans are living in very poor
conditions and improvement in those
built environments is a must. That
means, in some respects, the burden
to voluntarily check unbridled growth
lies on the shoulders and hearts of
wealthier communities. We must
face the hard questions, “How much
is enough?” and “What does actual
qualitative community development
look, sound, and feel like?”
Are we better off when our neigh-
borhoods become less walkable and
bikeable due to never-ending streams
of cars and trucks? Are we better
when urban habitat is totally razed
to maximize room for more large
houses?
If we want Central Oregon to re-
main a great place, leaders and res-
idents must get serious, right now,
about protecting remaining urban
trees and habitat, mandating smaller
footprint homes, protecting trail con-
nectivity and significantly reducing
the consumption of nature. We must
get to enough.
e e
Cylvia Hayes is the CEO of 3EStrategies
and the former first lady of Oregon.
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The COVID-19 pandemic improved how the world does science
BY TYLER COWEN
Bloomberg
T
he current pandemic will even-
tually end, leaving us more free
to ponder what to keep from all
the changes it has wrought. One obvi-
ous candidate is open-access scientific
journals.
Most relevant scientific advances
on the covid-19 front have been put
online in open-access form and then
debated online. Even if they later
came out in refereed journals, their
real impact came during their early
open-access days.
Open-access publishing has obvi-
ous advantages. The articles are free,
the whole world can read them, and
the interplay of ideas they generate
is easier to track. As scientific con-
tributions come from a greater num-
ber of different countries, including
many poorer countries, these fac-
tors will be increasingly important.
I work at a major U.S. research uni-
versity, but even so I am frequently
unable to gain access to desired aca-
demic publications.
To make a new open-access sys-
tem work would require a number
of pieces to fall into place. There is
such a path.
The Indian government has a pro-
posal, called the “One Nation, One
Subscription” plan, to buy bulk sub-
scriptions of the world’s most im-
portant scientific journals and pro-
vide them free to everyone in India.
Given the porousness of the internet,
and the widespread availability of
VPN services, general worldwide ac-
cess is likely to result.
Sci-Hub, based in Russia, already
offers open access to many scientific
publications.
But why stop there? Rather than
just reproducing published arti-
cles, the publication process could
be opened up altogether. If this In-
dian initiative happens, or if pirated
copies become more common, ac-
ademic journal publishing could
become less profitable. Perhaps the
gated publication sources will prove
unable to sustain themselves finan-
cially, especially as the budgets of
universities libraries continue to
tighten.
The biggest problem for an
open-access regime is how to ensure
good refereeing, which if done cor-
rectly raises the quality of academic
papers. Under the current system,
editors decide which papers get ref-
ereed, and they choose the identities
of the referees. Those same referees
are underpaid and underincentiv-
ized, and often do a poor or indiffer-
ent job.
Many of the original papers on
mRNA vaccines, for example, were
rejected numerous times by aca-
demic journals, hardly a ringing en-
dorsement of the status quo. More
generally, since publication is cur-
rently a yes/no decision, the ref-
ereeing system creates incentives
to avoid criticism and play it safe,
rather than to strike out with bold
new ideas and risk rejection.
Under my alternative vision, re-
search scientists would be told to
publish one-third less and devote
the extra time to volunteer referee-
ing of what they consider to be the
most important online postings.
That refereeing, which would not be
anonymous, would be considered as
a significant part of their research
contribution for tenure and promo-
tion. Professional associations, foun-
dations and universities could set
up prizes for the top referees, who
might be able to get tenure just by
being great at adding value to other
people’s work. If the lack of anonym-
ity bothers you, keep in mind that
book reviews are already a key de-
terminant for tenure in many fields,
such as the humanities, and they are
not typically anonymous.
Secondary institutions would
spotlight the most interesting pa-
pers and reviews, and they would
aggregate that information into
more digestible form — just as Goo-
gle Scholar helps to track citations.
With open-access publishing, it also
would be easier to revise papers to
incorporate new data or an author’s
change in opinion.
Overall, more collective effort
would be put into improving, revis-
ing and interpreting the most im-
portant results.
Under the current system in my
own profession — economics —
a large percentage of the top 50
schools will not consider candidates
for tenure unless they have some
publications in the top three or four
journals. Is that such a good sys-
tem for encouraging innovation and
nonconformism?
Critics might argue that under
this system more false results would
circulate. But keep in mind that this
new arrangement would devote
much more effort and attention to
high-quality, open-access refereeing.
Furthermore, the status quo is not
ideal. It is very hard to find reliable
information about how good any
given article is, even in a top journal.
In reality, many of these results are
false, nonreplicable or simply irrel-
evant for real-world problems. Peo-
ple outside the academic process do
not have much faith in what is being
certified.
The changes the pandemic has
forced in academic publishing ar-
en’t all bad. At the very least, they
have revealed that there are almost
certainly better ways to evaluate and
publish scientific research.
e e
Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg columnist. He is
a professor of economics at George Mason
University and writes for the blog Marginal
Revolution.