This story is part of our series Science Matters, where we interview scientists about the practical implications of federal attacks on science jobs, funding, and education for everyday families and public health.
It’s been a year since Kim Terrell walked away from her job of seven years as a staff scientist at Tulane’s Environmental Law Clinic, where she primarily studied the health impacts and economic tradeoffs of the fossil fuel and petrochemical industry in the Gulf South. At the time, she had just published a new study, “Pervasive Racial and Ethnic Disparities in the U.S. Petrochemical Workforce,” that garnered unusual backlash.
The unexpected controversy had nothing to do with the findings. “I don’t think anybody is really that surprised to know that the petrochemical workforce is disproportionately white. What surprised me was how extreme and consistent it was,” she says. Louisiana had the most extreme disparity of any U.S. state. Texas and Illinois were also close. “Only about 19% of the good petrochemical jobs are held by people of color.”
The disagreement also had nothing to do with her research, which came from publicly available government data. “This is not a complicated analysis where there’s any room for subjectivity at all. You could re-create everything that I did in a couple of hours,” she says.
Tell Congress: Protect Families From the Plastics and Petrochemical Industry
Bad timing
It was the timing of the study’s publication that doomed her, she contends. The media picked up on a sanctioned press release about the study on the same day that the president of Tulane happened to be at the state capital asking for money for a development project, she says. “They call it Tulane Day at the Capitol. It’s an annual thing where they talk about the economic impact of the university, the good that it does, and lobby for funding.”
Dr. Terrell says the provost told her everything was going “wonderfully” until a buzz took over the crowd. “Somebody said, ‘Tulane is anti-chemical industry because of this just-published study.’ In the provost’s words, people were left feeling uncomfortable and embarrassed. You shouldn’t be embarrassed about research. It’s research!”
Within a week, Dr. Terrell says she was told she could no longer communicate with anybody without prior approval. She even had to ask if she could respond to someone thanking her for judging a local science fair. “I think I’m being a bit snarky saying, Can I please have permission to say you’re welcome?” Instead, she says she was asked, What’s the potential for this communication to be public?
Dr. Terrell says Tulane’s faculty handbook explicitly states that all academic personnel, including staff scientists, are protected by academic freedom. She says she was told, “Academic freedom is not one size fits all. I think anytime you say freedom is not one size fits all, you’re on the wrong side of history,” she says. Silenced to a point where she was unable to do her job, she worked the phones (since her email was off limits) and found a temporary gig as a research scientist at the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP), a watchdog organization founded to hold the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency accountable. Today she’s still there. “I had been focused on wanting to stay in academia at a university, but I realized that a nonprofit gives me a lot more freedom and is a lot less subject to political interference.”
Science in America
Federal budget cuts under the second Trump administration have systematically undermined science and research as we’ve known it in America. Dr. Terrell says her experience with Tulane wasn’t entirely related. “Louisiana desensitizes you to that because that just sort of feels normal. I’ve seen so much ridiculous shenanigans with respect to science and science integrity from our State Department of Environmental Quality and State Department of Health: cherry-picking data, just making absurd conclusions that are not supported by the data. The whole country feels like Louisiana right now. Louisiana shouldn’t be the norm,” she says.
Still, she believes Tulane’s administration has been emboldened by what’s going on nationally. “There is some influence of the federal administration and national politics, but a lot of it was timing, individual special interests, and ego. That’s a theme nationally, right? A small number of individuals having an outsize negative impact on science.”
Nuances of her silencing aside, Dr. Terrell finds it validating that her scientific research was never attacked. “Throughout all of this, they didn’t raise a single criticism of the research itself. It just made people uncomfortable, and it was going to mess up funding,” she notes. Dr. Terrell, a Tulane graduate, says she left on her own terms and remains affiliated with Tulane’s Cancer Center.
It’s about the jobs
In a Guardian article about Dr. Terrell’s resignation, a spokesperson for Louisiana’s governor, Jeff Landry, says he never threatened to withhold state funding. “However,” the spokesperson adds, “I applaud Tulane for their actions standing up for our Louisiana businesses and jobs.”
Dr. Terrell’s environmental study is unique in that it was focused on jobs. “We want environmental regulators who make decisions based on objective science and who think about not only the distribution of harms, but also the distribution of economic benefits. That was really what my study focused on. That was also maybe part of the reason it got so much traction,” she says. People are used to thinking about and researching pollution and the petrochemical industry, and typically the emissions are justified in terms of money and economic benefit. “And if you say, actually these benefits are not going to the people who are experiencing the harms, all of a sudden, that threatens to undermine the only justification that they have.”
A year later
But that was then. And this is now. Not every scientist can afford to leave a job and, with budget cuts, not every scientist can find a new job. Dr. Terrell’s story is a good one. She landed well. Her work at EIP is focused on understanding the health impacts of industrial pollution, primarily in Louisiana, where she’s still based. She particularly enjoys that EIP is on the science end of the spectrum of environmental organizations. “As a scientist, the thing that I’ve always liked about them is that they’re focused on data and objective truth, as opposed to some other organizations are more policy focused or more social focused. We need all of that, but if you’re a scientist, the thing that is going to draw you in is the technical focus.”
Tell Congress: Protect Families From the Plastics and Petrochemical Industry