News out of Ames, Iowa, is that intelligent design advocate, physicist and astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, was denied tenure at Iowa State University.
Advocates of intelligent design will argue this as evidence of a bias against counter ideas, part of a massive, monolithic conspiracy to hide the truth about intelligent design. Gonzalez will be more circumspect, at least until his appeal of the tenure denial is finished.
Another friend of intelligent design, Dr. Francis Beckwith, a philosopher, was originally denied tenure at Baylor last year. His appeal was successful, however, and he now has tenure at Baylor, though he is moving from the Institute for Church State Relations to the philosophy department. Beckwith also made a splash in conservative evangelical news recently when he made public his return to the Catholic church.
I can’t speak for Iowa State, but it has been my experience that professors who get tangled up in crank science projects get distracted from the work that will get them tenure. While faculty certainly have free speech rights to advocate causes, much of the backing for intelligent design is sub-standard academically, or even bogus. Such advocacy does not help a case for tenure.
Advocates argue that Gonzalez has more than enough publications to meet the standards set by Iowa State, but the numbers do not account for how many of the publications may be in suspect journals that support intelligent design, nor do they account for the publicity an ardent ID advocate brings to a department which is often unwanted. Faculty at Iowa State collected 120 signatures on a petition disowning intelligent design, in what they billed was an attempt to convince the outside world that Iowa State is not “an intelligent design school.”
ID advocates frequently miss the point that science is not a game of racking up publication points, and that the quality and accuracy of the research also plays an important role in tenure decisions.
Wailing and gnashing, and perhaps rending of garments, from the ID group should begin any moment now.
- [If you’re searching research databases such as Pub-Med to find publications for Dr. Gonzalez, you should be aware that there are others with the name Guillermo Gonzalez in other kinds of research.]
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[…] good science and not religiously related. The DVD in question features an intelligent design advocate, Guillermo Gonzalez, who was denied tenure at Iowa State University in 2007 — in that flap, DI argued that the DVD was good science, not […]
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Thanks for dropping by, Dave. Did I say anywhere that Gonzalez isn’t published?
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Intelligent Design is STUPID. People need to learn the difference between religion and science. Religion isn’t everything.
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Gonzalez gets over 500 hits in astronomy related pubs on Google scholar. Few are “questionable” most are mainstream astronomy and astrophysics.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_q=Guillermo+Gonzalez+astro&num=100&btnG=Search+Scholar&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_occt=any&as_sauthors=&as_publication=&as_ylo=&as_yhi=&as_allsubj=all&hl=en&lr=
Gonzalez name shows up over 800 times on Nasa’s website alone.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Guillermo+Gonzalez+site%3A+nasa.gov
And he made the freaking cover of Scientific American.
But hey, don’t let facts get in the way of what you know to be true. You never have in the past so I don’t see any reason why you’d make an exception for this.
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[…] Another intelligent design advocate denied… […]
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