UQ accepts dirty money from DOW Chemical chief

University of Queensland vice-chancellor Peter Høj has announced plans to establish a new chemical engineering building named after the CEO and chairman of Dow Chemical, Andrew Liveris.

The “Andrew N. Liveris Building” and “Liveris Academy” will be funded, in Høj’s words, through a “historic gift” of $40 million from Liveris and his wife.

This might seem like business as usual at UQ – just another rich person paying to name a place or inanimate object after him/herself.

However, Dow Chemical has a sinister and destructive history. It was the exclusive manufacturer of napalm and a major producer of the defoliant Agent Orange, chemical weapons the United States deployed during the Vietnam War, killing and scarring tens of thousands.

To this day, children in Vietnam are born with horrific birth defects and illnesses because of Agent Orange. Dow refuses to accept any responsibility for this devastation.

Liveris is a business ally and supporter of Donald Trump. In 2017, Dow lobbied the Trump administration to overturn a US Environmental Protection Agency ban on the dangerous insecticide chlorpyrifos.

“The agency had recommended in 2015 that the chemical, already banned for application in homes in 2001, be banned for use on crops, as well”, wrote Emily Willingham last year at Forbes.com. “That proposal has now been spirited away under the anti-regulatory guidance of the EPA’s new administrator, Trump appointee Scott Pruitt.”

It is rank hypocrisy that a company that abuses the environment is now setting up an academy that the university says will “address sustainability issues”.

Activists at UQ are campaigning against this disgrace.