Iowa State University denies tenure to gifted pro-ID astronomer

Biblio-quiz: The Bible, the Quran or "Mein Kampf"?
Test your knowledge of three of the world's most influential books
http://archive.salon.com/people/feature/2001/10/24/book_quiz/index.html

 

this is quite refreshing too: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/05/a_man_after_my_own_heart_at_io.php#comment-442674

Avalos responds:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/05/avalos_responds.php

thanks to the OP who unwittingly brought Hector Avalos' work to our attention. His work does indeed deserve much broader recognition!

 

Yes, thank goodness we have tenure so there can be so much diversity of opinion on state-supported campuses. What total BS. You know as well as I do that the slightest hint of departure or skepticism regarding any of the myraid dictates of PC-thought will ruin an academic's career. Even someone like Larry Summers, a brilliant academic and Clinton cabinet officer, was run out of Harvard by PC nazis.

Surely you can see the absurdity in denying tenure to a gifted intellectual because of his opinions on a subject having nothing to do with what he teaches? If, as you claim, the whole point of tenure is to protect unpopular opinions, how was it served in this case?

Would our universities really be damaged by subjecting professors to minimal oversight? Perhaps we would have fewer atheists teaching religion, fewer departments awarding degrees for race, gender and sexual preference studies and fewer marxists teaching economics and history. Somehow I think our republic can withstand the loss.

There are hundreds of applicants for every teaching position at state universities. Tenure is merely a glorified form of union job protection. Why not open the process up to competition and merit? What are you afraid of?

 

It's interesting as well that higher education has been one of the fastest growing expenses in america. A college degree is the admission ticket to an upper middle class lifestyle, and the universities maintain a tightly controlled cartel selling that ticket. Congress is in a panic because people might have to pay a couple of hundred dollars a year extra for gasoline, but they couldn't care less about the higher education rip-off. The average full professor teaches at most a few hours a week. The rest of his or her time is spent grubbing for research grants, writing papers that no one will read or desperately trying to develop a consulting practice.

I wouldn't care if the government wasn't supporting much of this through grants, student loans and direct underwriting of university budgets. Since the govenrment is heavily involved, they have an obligation to see that these institutions are run efficiently and fairly and that they treat their customers fairly. Sadly, they have failed on all counts.

Universities maintain a particularly predatory form of price discrimination, designed to shake down families for the maximum amount possible. They have a posted "retail" price, which in practice only applies to the wealithiest students. They offer disguised discounts through grants, scholarships and loans, all calibrated to squeeze the maximum amount from students while leaving them with a parodoxical sense of gratitude to the institution. The shakedown continues even after graduation, with repeated demands for donations, which all involved understand amounts to thinly disguised extortion to ensure that the graduate's own offspring can gain admission in the future.

 

I am sure you really weep for those families who cannot afford to sent their children to college...

Oh, and a college degree is no guarantee at all to an upper middle class lifestyle.

Geez, it really is ridiculous the way you talk out of multiple sides of your mouth.

The republiklan are always preaching self determination when it comes to the job market, a free market system...and now you bitch about the cost of higher education?

Your logic is so contradictory, absurd.

Nothing prevents the very wealthy republiklan from starting their own conservative based universities, and controlling the tenure process, and making it affordable to those who normally can't afford it.

Nothing prevents mostly controlled by republiklan corporations to hire non college grad kids who are agreeable to their own politics.

What a crock...you acting as if you are concerned about higher education for those who can't afford it in a free market system.

 

Dark Matter: Blacklist at Iowa State

by Michael Egnor


It’s clear from the ideologically motivated attacks on Dr Guillermo Gonzalez, an assistant professor of astronomy and co-author of The Privileged Planet, that scientists who acknowledge the evidence for design in the universe are not welcome as tenured members of the Iowa State University faculty.

Anti-design scientists and bloggers have admitted publicly that they will continue to exclude intelligent design scientists from academia. Yet in the 20th century many of the advances in the understanding of our universe were accompanied by vigorous open discussion of the design implications of cosmological theories.

From the Enlightenment to early the 20th century, virtually all astronomers believed that the universe was eternal. When solutions for Einstein’s tensor equations were proposed in the first decades of the 20th century, it was evident that they were compatible with an expansion (or contraction) of the universe. With Edwin Hubble’s observation of the redshift that showed evidence for an expanding universe, some astrophysicists proposed that the universe had a moment of creation. Many other astrophysicists were troubled by the theological implications of a “moment of creation,” and proposed a Steady State (eternal) model of the cosmos.

There was a vigorous free discussion of the scientific, philosophical and theological implications of the expanding universe by scientists in the early and mid 20th century. A “moment of creation” — the Big Bang — implied a creator, and implied design. Based on the evidence, design won, and the advocates of the steady state model showed integrity and grace in acknowledging that the Big Bang theory, despite its design implications, was the best theory to explain the emergence and structure of the universe.

As agnostic astrophysicist Robert Jastrow famously said:

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

As the blacklist at Iowa State shows, 21st century atheists lack the integrity and grace of their predecessors. This time, they intend to make sure that theories that invoke even the possibility of design in the universe are excluded, and theorists who are open to the possibility of design are blacklisted.

Modern atheists know that they lost the scientific debate about the Big Bang in the 20th century. This time around, they are making sure that there will be no debate.

Please contact Iowa State University President Gregory L. Geoffroy (515-294 -2042 or president@iastate.edu) and ask him to grant tenure to Dr. Gonzalez, and to end the blacklisting of scientists who support intelligent design at Iowa State.

 

thanks i am sending him a copy of the Wedge document right away, so it can be widely published as it should... am sure that's gonna get u votes


"GOALS
Governing Goals
. To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies.
. To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and hurnan beings are created by God. "


http://www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.html

THE WEDGE STRATEGY
CENTER FOR THE RENEWAL OF SCIENCE & CULTURE
INTRODUCTION

The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built. Its influence can be detected in most, if not all, of the West's greatest achievements, including representative democracy, human rights, free enterprise, and progress in the arts and sciences.

Yet a little over a century ago, this cardinal idea came under wholesale attack by intellectuals drawing on the discoveries of modern science. Debunking the traditional conceptions of both God and man, thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud portrayed humans not as moral and spiritual beings, but as animals or machines who inhabited a universe ruled by purely impersonal forces and whose behavior and very thoughts were dictated by the unbending forces of biology, chemistry, and environment. This materialistic conception of reality eventually infected virtually every area of our culture, from politics and economics to literature and art

The cultural consequences of this triumph of materialism were devastating. Materialists denied the existence of objective moral standards, claiming that environment dictates our behavior and beliefs. Such moral relativism was uncritically adopted by much of the social sciences, and it still undergirds much of modern economics, political science, psychology and sociology.

Materialists also undermined personal responsibility by asserting that human thoughts and behaviors are dictated by our biology and environment. The results can be seen in modern approaches to criminal justice, product liability, and welfare. In the materialist scheme of things, everyone is a victim and no one can be held accountable for his or her actions.

Finally, materialism spawned a virulent strain of utopianism. Thinking they could engineer the perfect society through the application of scientific knowledge, materialist reformers advocated coercive government programs that falsely promised to create heaven on earth.

Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies. Bringing together leading scholars from the natural sciences and those from the humanities and social sciences, the Center explores how new developments in biology, physics and cognitive science raise serious doubts about scientific materialism and have re-opened the case for a broadly theistic understanding of nature. The Center awards fellowships for original research, holds conferences, and briefs policymakers about the opportunities for life after materialism.

The Center is directed by Discovery Senior Fellow Dr. Stephen Meyer. An Associate Professor of Philosophy at Whitworth College, Dr. Meyer holds a Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University. He formerly worked as a geophysicist for the Atlantic Richfield Company.

THE WEDGE STRATEGY
Phase I.

Scientific Research, Writing & Publicity
Phase II.

Publicity & Opinion-making
Phase III.

Cultural Confrontation & Renewal
THE WEDGE PROJECTS
Phase I. Scientific Research, Writing & Publication

Individual Research Fellowship Program
Paleontology Research program (Dr. Paul Chien et al.)
Molecular Biology Research Program (Dr. Douglas Axe et al.)
Phase II. Publicity & Opinion-making

Book Publicity
Opinion-Maker Conferences
Apologetics Seminars
Teacher Training Program
Op-ed Fellow
PBS (or other TV) Co-production
Publicity Materials / Publications
Phase III. Cultural Confrontation & Renewal

Academic and Scientific Challenge Conferences
Potential Legal Action for Teacher Training
Research Fellowship Program: shift to social sciences and humanities
FIVE YEAR STRATEGIC PLAN SUMMARY
The social consequences of materialism have been devastating. As symptoms, those consequences are certainly worth treating. However, we are convinced that in order to defeat materialism, we must cut it off at its source. That source is scientific materialism. This is precisely our strategy. If we view the predominant materialistic science as a giant tree, our strategy is intended to function as a "wedge" that, while relatively small, can split the trunk when applied at its weakest points. The very beginning of this strategy, the "thin edge of the wedge," was Phillip ]ohnson's critique of Darwinism begun in 1991 in Darwinism on Trial, and continued in Reason in the Balance and Defeatng Darwinism by Opening Minds. Michael Behe's highly successful Darwin's Black Box followed Johnson's work. We are building on this momentum, broadening the wedge with a positive scientific alternative to materialistic scientific theories, which has come to be called the theory of intelligent design (ID). Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.

The Wedge strategy can be divided into three distinct but interdependent phases, which are roughly but not strictly chronological. We believe that, with adequate support, we can accomplish many of the objectives of Phases I and II in the next five years (1999-2003), and begin Phase III (See "Goals/ Five Year Objectives/Activities").

Phase I: Research, Writing and Publication

Phase II: Publicity and Opinion-making

Phase III: Cultural Confrontation and Renewal

Phase I is the essential component of everything that comes afterward. Without solid scholarship, research and argument, the project would be just another attempt to indoctrinate instead of persuade. A lesson we have learned from the history of science is that it is unnecessary to outnumber the opposing establishment. Scientific revolutions are usually staged by an initially small and relatively young group of scientists who are not blinded by the prevailing prejudices and who are able to do creative work at the pressure points, that is, on those critical issues upon which whole systems of thought hinge. So, in Phase I we are supporting vital witting and research at the sites most likely to crack the materialist edifice.

Phase II. The pnmary purpose of Phase II is to prepare the popular reception of our ideas. The best and truest research can languish unread and unused unless it is properly publicized. For this reason we seek to cultivate and convince influential individuals in pnnt and broadcast media, as well as think tank leaders, scientists and academics, congressional staff, talk show hosts, college and seminary presidents and faculty, future talent and potential academic allies. Because of his long tenure in politics, journalism and public policy, Discovery President Bruce Chapman brings to the project rare knowledge and acquaintance of key op-ed writers, journalists, and political leaders. This combination of scientific and scholarly expertise and media and political connections makes the Wedge unique, and also prevents it from being "merely academic." Other activities include production of a PBS documentary on intelligent design and its implications, and popular op-ed publishing. Alongside a focus on influential opinion-makers, we also seek to build up a popular base of support among our natural constituency, namely, Chnstians. We will do this primarily through apologetics seminars. We intend these to encourage and equip believers with new scientific evidence's that support the faith, as well as to "popularize" our ideas in the broader culture.

Phase III. Once our research and writing have had time to mature, and the public prepared for the reception of design theory, we will move toward direct confrontation with the advocates of materialist science through challenge conferences in significant academic settings. We will also pursue possible legal assistance in response to resistance to the integration of design theory into public school science curricula. The attention, publicity, and influence of design theory should draw scientific materialists into open debate with design theorists, and we will be ready. With an added emphasis to the social sciences and humanities, we will begin to address the specific social consequences of materialism and the Darwinist theory that supports it in the sciences.

GOALS
Governing Goals

To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies.
To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and hurnan beings are created by God.
Five Year Goals

To see intelligent design theory as an accepted alternative in the sciences and scientific research being done from the perspective of design theory.
To see the beginning of the influence of design theory in spheres other than natural science.
To see major new debates in education, life issues, legal and personal responsibility pushed to the front of the national agenda.
Twenty Year Goals

To see intelligent design theory as the dominant perspective in science.
To see design theory application in specific fields, including molecular biology, biochemistry, paleontology, physics and cosmology in the natural sciences, psychology, ethics, politics, theology and philosophy in the humanities; to see its innuence in the fine arts.
To see design theory permeate our religious, cultural, moral and political life. "

 

excellent idea -- done!


contact Iowa State University President Gregory L. Geoffroy or president@iastate.edu

Subject: Statement of Support

Sir,

This is simply a line of support in a moment where your office may find itself under attack by ID/Creationist activists. I trust no other words are required here to let you know that you are not alone in the challenging task of providing proper scientific education, free of religiously and politically* motivated interferences.

Regards,
Name: ................
(Academic quals: .................. )
Location: ...........

*: the Wedge document & related “strategy” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_strategy

 

"...and politically* motivated interferences."

Your dull minded letter itself is political in nature.

What a dope...

 

to yr 2-bit activist mind it is... even a banana is a political statement to u i'm sure http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=1268663&highlight=banana#post1268663