Science Education

The Ames, Iowa Tribune is now calling for an explanation from Iowa State University’s president about the recent denial of tenure to pro-ID astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez. It seems clear that the hard questions being raised about Gonzalez’s case aren’t about to go away.

Iowa State University has attempted to defend its denial of tenure to widely-published pro-ID astronomer Guillmero Gonzalez by insisting earlier this week that tenure is hard to get at ISU. Indeed, according to a statement about the Gonzalez case posted on ISU’s home page, tenure

is a high standard of excellence and achievement — so high, that many good researchers have failed to satisfy the demands of earning tenure.

So just how “many” is “many”? Not very many, it turns out. We requested data from ISU on the number of tenure applications and rejections at the university for the past five years, and here is what we found out:

The Associated Press is now covering the denial of tenure Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez at Iowa State University, filing a fair-minded and generally accurate article that mentions some of Dr. Gonzalez’s scientific accomplishments and discusses the surrounding context of intolerance.

Today’s Des Moines Register has an article highlighting the growing controversy over the denial of tenure to gifted astronomer Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez at Iowa State University (ISU). The story is remarkably fair and accurate as far as it goes, and it reveals that the approval rate for tenure applications in Gonzalez’s department over the past ten years has approached 70%! So much for the claim that tenure at ISU is particularly hard to get. Unfortunately, what the article doesn’t do is give any information about Dr. Gonzalez’s outstanding scholarly record—such as the fact that his work has been recognized in Science, Nature, Scientific American, and many other top science publications; or the fact that he is co-author of a major Read More ›

Editor’s Update: Discovery Institute has just issued a press release about Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez’s denial of tenure. Iowa State University has denied tenure to astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, co-author of The Privileged Planet, which presents powerful scientific evidence for the intelligent design of the universe. You can read about the situation in today’s Ames Tribune here. This is a very sad day for academic freedom. Dr. Gonzalez is a superb scholar and a fine human being. His research has been featured in Scientific American, Science, Nature, and many other science journals. Iowa State’s decision to deny him tenure is a travesty, and the university should be held to account for its action. This deserves to be an even bigger story than Read More ›

So just why was gifted astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez at Iowa State University denied tenure? Certainly not because he hasn’t fulfilled his university’s tenure standards for excellence in research. According to his own department’s standards, to be promoted to associate professor (with tenure), excellence sufficient to lead to a national or international reputation is required and would ordinarily be shown by the publication of approximately fifteen papers of good quality in refereed journals. So how many refereed articles has Gonzalez published? Ten? Twelve? Fifteen? Twenty? Actually, he has published 68 articles in refereed journals, thus exceeding his own department’s normal standard for research excellence by 350%! (Unfortunately, the Ames Tribune story about the denial of tenure to Gonzalez wrongly reports that Read More ›

Darwinists sometimes make a highly suspect argument along the lines of, “don’t change evolution education because you’ll divide the community.” Most school districts presently teach only the scientific evidence which supports Darwinian evolution and nothing more on this topic. Does that satisfy the public or divide them? In fact, polls consistently show that Americans want more than just the pro-evolution side of the story taught in schools. A 2005 Harris poll found that 82% of Americans want alternatives to evolution taught. A 2006 Zogby poll corroborated that statistic, finding that a supermajority of Ohio adults want both scientific evidence for and against evolution taught, and 75% of Americans want intelligent design taught alongside evolution. In both polls, under 20% wanted Read More ›

In March of 2002, the Cobb County School Board adopted a policy requiring stickers to be placed in biology textbooks which committed the apparently unconstitutional crime of stating, “Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.” The lawsuit ended last December, when the school district entered into a lose-lose-lose settlement with the ACLU: (1) The district had to pay the ACLU $166,659, (2) The district had to permanently remove the stickers, and (3) The district was permanently enjoined from “making any disclaimers regarding evolution.” I don’t favor using the “evolution is a theory, not a fact” line because it enters semantic Read More ›

It looks like CSC contributor Michael Egnor is not the only professor of medicine to stick his neck out for intelligent design and face severe personal attack. Dr. John Marshall of The University of Missouri–Columbia lectured this week on his own campus with the title “Intelligent Design: Is It Science or Religion?”

A student at Southern Methodist University (SMU) has provided more evidence for why there needs to be events like tonight’s Darwin v. Design conference on college campuses. In today’s campus newspaper, anthropology student Ben Wells offers a jeremiad against the purported evils of Discovery Institute and intelligent design. Unfortunately, his article is so incredibly off-base that all he ends up doing is displaying his complete ignorance of the topic. Not that he is alone. Last week, journalist Lee Cullum wrote a similarly ill-informed opinion piece for the Dallas Morning News. The problem for many critics of intelligent design is that they are so sure they are right, they don’t bother to read the people they are denouncing. As a result, they end up attacking a straw man rather than refuting the actual claims made by ID proponents.