Science and Culture Today | Page 1364 | Discovering Design in Nature

The President of Iowa State University, Gregory Geoffroy, has issued a statement defending his denial of the tenure appeal of Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez. In the statement, Geoffroy claims that he concluded that Gonzalez “simply did not show the trajectory of excellence that we expect in a candidate seeking tenure in physics and astronomy.”

Ah, yes, President Geoffroy has such high standards of excellence that only the most outstanding professors are allowed to achieve tenure at ISU.

Geoffroy’s high standards must be why he approved 91% of the tenure applicants at ISU in 2007 (and why the tenure approval rate has gone up each year at ISU for the past five years).

Geoffroy’s high standards are presumably also why he promoted to full professor this year Hector Avalos, the ISU faculty member who argues in his “scholarship” that the Bible is worse than Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Yes, according to President Geoffroy’s exalted standards, only the best and brightest are allowed to stay at ISU!

But there’s more.

Guillermo Gonzalez has issued a statement about the rejection of his tenure appeal by ISU President Gregory Geoffroy: I learned on the morning of June 1, 2007 that President Geoffroy has denied my tenure appeal. I understand that this was a very difficult decision for him to make given its far-reaching implications. It is now clear to me that this decision, in effect, had been predetermined by August 2005, when Hector Avalos and other ISU professors began circulating a petition statement condemning Intelligent Design. At the same time several of the same ISU faculty spread misinformation about me and the nature of my Intelligent Design research in the local press. These events poisoned the atmosphere among the faculty and administration Read More ›

The Ames Tribune has reported that the tenure appeal of Iowa State University (ISU) astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez has been denied by ISU President Gregory Geoffroy. It’s a sad day for academic freedom. A statement by Geoffroy defending his decision can be found here, while a statement by Gonzalez disputing the decision can be found here.

Links of Interest: Hoax of Dodos, a response to inaccuracies in Flock of DodosHaeckel’s Bogus Embryo Drawings (Clip on YouTube) As noted recently, we are presently highlighting some textbooks that use Haeckel’s fraudulent embryo drawings to promote evolution. These textbooks use Haeckel’s drawings to assert that they represent factual evidence for evolution in the present-day. “Flock of Dodos” film producer Randy Olson has claimed that either (A) the fraudulent drawings haven’t been used in any modern textbooks, or alternatively, if that argument fails, then (B) when they are used, it isn’t to promote evolution, but simply to demonstrate some kind of historical perspective on the development of evolutionary thought. This post will discuss one recently-published textbook, Peter H Raven & Read More ›

The The Chronicle of Higher Education began its recent article on Guillermo Gonzalez’s tenure case by admitting that Dr. Gonzalez “has amassed a better publication record than almost any other member of the astronomy faculty,” and that, “[a]t first glance, it seems like a clear-cut case of discrimination.” But the article was desperately looking for a way to attack Gonzalez. They managed to find one astronomer (who admitted he “has not studied Mr. Gonzalez’s work in detail and is not an expert on [Gonzalez’s] tenure case”) who was willing to make the argument that Dr. Gonzalez’s production has “slowed down considerably” at Iowa State University (ISU), alleging that “[i]t’s not clear that he started new things” since joining ISU. What Read More ›

Not so fast, say disabilities advocates Andrew J. Imparato and Anne C. Sommers of the American Association of People With Disabilities. In their Washington Post article, “Haunting Echoes of Eugenics,” the two authors describe, among other things, the terrible campaign to eliminate persons with Down syndrome before they ever arrive.

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Action Item:
Help Guillermo Gonzalez in his fight for academic freedom. Contact ISU President Gregory L. Geoffroy at (515) 294-2042 or email him at president@iastate.edu and let him know that you support academic freedom for Dr. Gonzalez to follow the evidence wherever it leads.

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Guillermo Gonzalez, the pro-intelligent design astronomer recently denied tenure by Iowa State University (ISU), ranks the highest in his department according to a key measure of the scientific impact of his work calculated using the Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS), a widely used database tracking published scientific research in astronomy.

How frequently a scientist’s work is cited by other scientists is an important indicator of the impact the scientist is having on the scientific community. The Smithsonian/NASA data system allows one to compute a “normalized” citation count that corrects for inflated citation rates caused by articles with multiple authors. In the normalized citation count, an article published by a scientist with many co-authors is weighted less than an article authored by the scientist alone.