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ISU’s tenure process and official explanation in the Gonzalez case exposed as a sham.
Des Moines, IA — Iowa State University faculty plotted to deny tenure to a distinguished astronomer, as revealed in private emails written by faculty and administrators at ISU.

Discovery Institute is making public a record of secret emails exchanged among faculty at Iowa State University about noted ISU astronomer Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez. The emails demonstrate that a campaign was organized and conducted against Gonzalez by his colleagues, with the intent to deny him tenure because of views he holds on the intelligent design (ID) of the universe, expressed in his 2004 book The Privileged Planet. In spite of his distinguished publishing career, Gonzalez was denied tenure by ISU in the spring of 2007.

Faculty involved in the tenure decision were well aware of Gonzalez’s support for ID. More than one year before his tenure evaluation was scheduled, one ISU professor wrote an e-mail that left no doubt that Gonzalez’s tenure application would never receive a fair evaluation.

“He will be up for tenure next year,” wrote the professor. “And if he keeps up, it might be a hard sell to the department.”
Contrary to his public statements, and those of ISU President Gregory Geoffroy, the chairman of ISU’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, Dr. Eli Rosenberg, stated in Dr. Gonzalez’s tenure dossier that Dr. Gonzalez’s support for intelligent design “disqualifies him from serving as a science educator.”

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Click to download ID Was the Issue After All (including e-mail quotes)
Click to download Backgrounder on Guillermo Gonzalez Story
Click to download Q&A on Guillermo Gonzalez Story

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“Dr. Rosenberg misled Dr. Gonzalez, the public, and the media when he said that ID barely played a role in the decision,” said Casey Luskin, Discovery Institute’s attorney for public policy and legal affairs. “In fact, a third of his own statement in the tenure dossier focused on Gonzalez’s views on intelligent design, where he instructed faculty that support for ID as science should be a litmus test for denying tenure to Dr. Gonzalez.”

ISU faculty have claimed that ID was not discussed as often as other subjects during the tenure deliberations, but that “is only because at secret and inappropriate tenure deliberations held via e-mail a year before the official process started, they decided that they wanted Gonzalez out of ISU because he supported intelligent design,” said Luskin.

Gonzalez’s colleagues privately deliberated via e-mails about his tenure and collaborated to express their intolerance toward him by asserting that ID is “intellectually vacuous,” and “more than just vacuous,” and that “embalming is more of a science” than ID.

They also wrote that Gonzalez should be lumped with “idiots” and “religious nutcases.” They mocked Gonzalez’s ID work, saying they would study it “[u]nder medication.”

His own department members drafted–and nearly released–a petition against ID with the avowed purpose “to discredit” Gonzalez and “give Gonzalez a clear sign that his ID efforts will not be considered as science by the faculty.”

Documents show Gonzalez was denied fair tenure process by hostile colleagues who plotted behind his back, suppressed evidence, and then misled the public. Click Here To See a PDF Version of this Document with Citations Included. Executive Summary.Internal e-mails and other documents obtained under the Iowa Open Records Act contradict public claims by Iowa State University (ISU) that denial of tenure to astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez was unrelated to his writing on the theory of intelligent design. According to these documents: The bottom line according to these documents is that Dr. Gonzalez’s rights to academic freedom, free speech, and a fair tenure process were trampled on by colleagues who were driven by ideological zeal when they should have made an impartial Read More ›

The Des Moines Register has run a story that starts to reveal the real reasons Iowa State University has denied tenure to one of its most productive astronomy faculty members, Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez, and yes, it turns out to be a case of discrimination based on Gonzalez’s views that the origin of the universe shows scientifically detectable signs of design.But The DMR story is just the tip of the iceberg. A press conference Monday will reveal more of the suppressed email traffic that shows the climate of viewpoint suppression at Iowa State that led to denial of tenure for Dr. Gonzalez. In important addition, it will unveil the high level cover-up that tried to prevent the public from learning the Read More ›

I got two calls last night about Dr. John West’s presentation at the University of Minnesota on Darwinism’s fathership of eugenics. It appears that the scholarly and well-delivered lecture, derived from the new West book, Darwin Day in America, was successful in influencing the thinking of a largely skeptical audience. (The dyspeptic and ad hominem blogger/biologist Dr. P.Z. Myers was there and brought a Darwinist claque. West generously introduced him and acknowledged him as Minnesota’s Richard Dawkins, which is about right.)

Some Darwinists are presently making the false assertion that Discovery Institute wanted Judge Jones to rule broadly on whether ID is science in the Kitzmiller case. All this comes in the wake of Judge Jones’ recent admissions regarding the activist nature of the Kitzmiller ruling. The Darwinist response to Judge Jones’s admissions is revealing: Rather than defending the Judge Jones activist behavior in the Kitzmller ruling, Darwinists have implicitly conceded the activism by changing the subject, and attacking us for allegedly encouraging its activism. As is the usual case when ID proponents make a good point, Darwinists try to deflect the issue by changing the subject and launching into personal attacks. This tells you that we have done something right Read More ›

On Monday December 3rd, at a news conference in the Iowa state capitol, Discovery Institute will release a record of secret emails exchanged among faculty at Iowa State University about ISU astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez. The emails demonstrate that a campaign was conducted against him by his colleagues, with the intent to deny Gonzalez tenure because of views he holds on the intelligent design of the universe, expressed in his 2004 book The Privileged Planet.

Gonzalez was denied tenure at ISU earlier this year. While ISU president Gregory Geoffroy claimed that the decision was because Gonzalez “did not show the trajectory of excellence that we expect” and not because of his views on ID, it has become increasingly clear that his views on ID are exactly what led to his being forced out. Indeed, the day after the president announced his decision ISU professor John Hauptman published an op-ed in the Des Moines Register in which he contradicted the university and admitted that ID was the specific reason that he voted against Dr. Gonzalez receiving tenure.

Here is Dr. Gonzalez’s trajectory of excellence, a trajectory that far outstrips most other faculty at ISU with tenure, even in his own department.

Michael Behe will be on C-SPAN 2’s “Close Up at the Newseum” program airing today at 7 pm EST. From his Amazon blog: Case Western Reserve University Professor Patricia Princehouse and I recently taped an episode of the program “Close Up at the Newseum”, where we discussed intelligent design, Darwinism, The Edge of Evolution, and other topics with an audience of about 40 high school students. The purpose of Close Up is to get students interested in issues of the day, and to become active participants in our democracy. The show will air this Friday, November 30th, at 7:00 p.m. Eastern time, on C-SPAN 2. Also be sure to visit his Amazon Author’s page to read his responses to his Read More ›

In this week’s National Review (December 3, 2007), theoretical particle physicist Stephen Barr takes on those who claim that the findings of modern science have banished the ideas of mind or soul. Barr, with whom many of us at Discovery have misgivings regarding his use of the word “random” in neo-Darwinian theory, nonetheless gives an excellent exposition of philosophy of mind’s intersection with contemporary physics in his article “The Soul and Its Enemies” (sorry: password required).Barr concludes: We see, then, that those who confidently assert that scientific discoveries have banished the soul to the realm of myth offer only a limited view of the evidence. Indeed, the very possibility of scientific discoveries points to man’s openness to truth and his Read More ›

Note: This is one of a series of posts adapted from my new book, Darwin Day in America. You can find other posts in the series here.

From the 1890s into the early years of the twentieth century, a growing number of American doctors advocated castration as a solution for habitual criminals as well as rapists and murderers. Proponents of castration like Frank Lydston derided the failed rehabilitation efforts of the “sentimentalist and his natural ally, the preacher,” and argued that “asexualization” surgery would produce results by preventing criminals from passing down their criminal tendencies to their children, by striking fear into non-castrated criminals, and by changing the personality of the castrated criminal. “The murderer is likely to lose much of his savageness; the violator loses not only the desire, but the capacity for a repetition of his crime, if the operation be supplemented by penile mutilation according to the Oriental method.” Lydston’s views were grounded forthrightly in scientific materialism. “The attempt to reduce criminology to a rational and materialistic basis has constituted a great step in advance — one which marks a distinct epoch in scientific sociology,” he proclaimed in 1896.

What’s the single book that you would most like your friends to read? According to U.K. pro-ID blogger Exiled from Groggs, it is Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt’s book A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature. According to the reviewer, formerly at Cambridge, “Of all the books on the great debate that I have read – and there are a fair few on both sides! – this is probably the one I have enjoyed the most, and the one which ought ideally to have the most potential to influence.” He goes on to explain why: Wiker and Witt’s thesis is that the universe is rich in “meaning” – the dominance of the materialist worldview Read More ›