Some clown at one of the ID blogs is making an incredibly stupid argument. She is claiming that my statement that I would not vote to give tenure to someone incompetent enough to support Intelligent Design creationism as a science is a violation of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1991 because, as Judge Jones has ruled, ID is founded on a specific religious view. She seems to think that demanding some standards in the review process is equivalent to excluding all religious people…which has some interesting implications. She must assume that the level of idiocy we see in the creationist crowd is implicit in all religious beliefs, and that religious people are incapable of teaching or research without babbling nonsense. She has an even more jaundiced view of the religious than I do!
Her claim, if valid, would mean that we could teach any ol’ belief we wanted in the classroom, and as long as we said it was part of our religion (or was so ludicrously absurd that the only possible justification for it is that it was a religious belief), then the instructor could not be criticized. Astronomy professors could say the Earth was suspended on the back of a turtle, geology professors could literally argue that rocks are the bones of Gaia, chemists could teach their traditional model of the four (and only four!) elements. The foolproof method of gaining tenure would be to come to class every day and read aloud from the bible…and when the tenure review committee justly voted to boot your butt out the door, sue them for violating your civil rights.
The IDists are definitely desperate when this kind of nutjob dreck is how they decide to defend their ideas. I shouldn’t even bother addressing it, it’s so pathetic…so I’ll leave you to read one defender’s view.
There is no civil right to get a particular job.
Wait.
You mean the Earth isn’t supported on the backs of four elephants? But I’ve seen pictures
(well, drawings, but they were very good)! Next you’ll be telling me that my degree from
the Unseen University is a fake!
Nunc Vides – Nunc Ne Vides
Don’t those people require that their staff sign a statement of belief?
That’s like claiming you’re violating civil rights by not hiring a blind man to work as a crocodile handler.
That’s a claim that was also made about me when I told the Ohio State Board of Education that I wouldn’t hire someone who believed that ID is a legitimate scientific alternative to evolutionary theory. My business depends on the validity of evo theory, and someone who believes ID is a legit alternative is at the very least incompetent. Many are delusional. In either case I’m not about to hire one.
RBH
This claim is rank nonsense. I’m a high school teacher and a Christian who holds views very different with respect to the supernatural than Professor Myers. However, I AGREE WITH HIM ONE HUNDRED PERCENT: advocates for ID or some other version of creationism in the science curriculum should NOT be granted tenure at any institute of higher learning.
I would go further: those people should not be allowed to teach high school biology, either, because they inevitably lead the districts that employ them into expensive litigation. The idea that such individuals are being deprived of their civil liberties is false; there are number of court cases that support this can be found at this excellent web page maintained by NCSE:
http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/articles/3747_8_major_court_decisions_agains_2_15_2001.asp
Bottom line: pushing creationism in the public schools is illegal, and likely to remain so, especially when its advocates are shockingly ignorant of case law already ‘on the books’ which undercut their claims.
Scott Hatfield
[email protected]
PZ, if the tenure candidate believed in ID based on religious faith, but said it was not science and therefore not something to be taught as science, however, they thought they might might blog in support of it on their own time — given all that, is that an automatic disqualification?
Nope.
Although I would scrutinize them a little more skeptically, I will admit.
Should an Internal Medicine Dept. grant tenure to a candidate with a good publishing record in homeopathy?
Les,
In the UK, we have some NHS (funded and run by the state) homeopathic hospitals……make of that what you will.
I may have posted this in your comments before, but once again the Sage of Baltimore has some fine words of advice:
“The meaning of religious freedom, I fear, is sometimes greatly misapprehended. It is taken to be a sort of immunity, not merely from governmental control but also from public opinion. A dunderhead gets himself a long-tailed coat, rises behind the sacred desk, and emits such bilge as would gag a Hottentot. Is it to pass unchallenged? If so, then what we have is not religious freedom at all, but the most intolerable and outrageous variety of religious despotism. Any fool, once he is admitted to holy orders, becomes infallible. Any half-wit, by the simple device of ascribing his delusions to revelation, takes on an authority that is denied to all the rest of us.” – H. L. Mencken
There are more than four elements? My Organic professor seems to think that Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen and Nitrogen are the only ones that matter.
P.S.: I’m kidding, just in case it’s not obvious ;-P
No.
And there’s no such thing as a good publishing record in homeopathy, scientifically speaking.
Hehe, it is a conspiracy, and a successful one at that. Here one’s busy whacking the pathetic nutjob dreck, and thinking that something is being accomplished, while the real important cases of lying keep getting away with it. I mean things like this:
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/008284.php. If all the good minds in the country simultaneously said “boo” maybe we’d chase away these SOBs from the halls of power. The attack on science is merely a diversion, a distraction, a sideshow from the main purpose of these folks. The real attack is on the Republic.
So I thought ID wasn’t a religious position, eh?
That’s exactly what I was thinking, beervolcano. Isn’t that what they’ve been trying to prove to us all this time, that teaching ID isn’t teaching religion? Trying to keep up with these people gives me whiplash. Any abuse of science or reasoning is allowed–no, mandatory–in order to support the predetermined conclusion.
Wow, that’s gonna save me a lot of time! They should just give me my Ph.D. right now.
“chemists could teach their traditional model of the four (and only four!) elements”
Next lecture – water tetrafirate complexes of earthonium ions!
Bah. Everyone should know that there are 5 elements. Hint: that movie, The Fifth Element is not about boron.
I do agree with the general gist of the opinions here, but I am as usual wondering about the rough edges. Should one grant tenure (hire, etc.) (say) an evolutionary biologist, who (somehow) thinks there are five elements? Or to a particle physicist who is a creationist? A philosopher who thinks that Bacon wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare? A physical education professor who is fond of psychoanalysis?
The clown lady’s got you here PZ. You said nothing about teaching this stuff, only thinking it’s true. You’re part of the thought police.
Well, call me Alfred Bester and spank my hypothalamus: my secret is out. Yes, it’s true, I’m a telepath, and I screen all my colleagues for goodthink. And here we’ve tried so hard to keep the existence of the Academic Psi-Corps secret for so long.
Hmm…that’s not what I read in PZ’s post, crimestopper. This is what he said: “I get to vote on tenure decisions at my university, and I can assure you that if someone comes up who claims that ID ‘theory’ is science, I will vote against them.”
Anyone who claims that ID is science has no grasp of the basics of science and shouldn’t be granted tenure in order to miseducate other generations in perpetuity.
…
I would have responded to you on your own blog, but I have tried to post comments before and they have never made it out of the pre-screen holding bin. So there would be no point. Thus I’m responding here, figuring that you will either see it on one of your drive-bys or it will be forwarded to you by Nutter or someone else.
So, starting with my objection to your original assertions, the three sentences below from that blog contain very specific verbs describing what would disqualify a tenure candidate in your view:
< <<<< “I can assure you that if someone comes up who claims that ID ‘theory’ is science, I will vote against them. If someone thinks the sun orbits around the earth, I will vote against them. If someone thinks fairies live in their garden and pull up the flowers out of the ground every spring, I will vote against them.”< <<<<
Notice if you will that the word “teach” does not appear in any of these three sentences. There’s one “claims” and two “thinks.” Using requisite standard English grammar, I parse these words to relate to a candidate’s beliefs and expression. You said nothing in your original blog about the candidate’s teaching record – which usually amounts to years’ worth of evaluations and is a legitimate body of evidence to be considered whenever tenure is offered or applied for.
It would be academically justifiable and perfectly legal to deny tenure to a teacher who has used his/her classroom to teach that ID is science while ignoring the body of evidence for standard NDS theoretics, if teaching the body of evidence for standard NDS theoretics is the curriculum expectation and course description (i.e., it’s not a class on ID). But that is NOT what you actually said. What you said is that you would vote against tenure for what a candidate “claims” or “thinks” about ID – IOW, his/her beliefs and expression, things clearly under the protection of the Constitution’s first amendment, civil rights law, fair employment practices and your own university’s policies.
…
This is probably completely off-topic, because ID has nothing to do with religion, but consider this case:
If “religious freedom” is an all-purpose excuse for not doing your homework, will anything ever get taught?
If so, then despite the “No Child Left Behind” act, there could be a new series of “left behind” stories of US children left behind (and in the dust) by the educated children of the rest of the world.
I sincerely hope that the person who wrote this tract isn’t a constitutional scholar, because this is bloody nonsense. The First Amendment doesn’t grant immunity from the consequences of your “beliefs and expression”.
None of the things listed — not the First Amendment, civil rights law, fair employment practices, or any university policy — can protect you from your own intellectual incompetence (of which a belief in ID is a sure sign), or grant you tenure in spite of it. The real world simply doesn’t work that way, nor should it.
I see “Joy” of ARN and Telic Thoughts fame has posted her “response” here.
And I’ll bet she’s all a-tingle!
Did I misread the post, or was someone arguing that since ID is officially recognised as a religious belief, it’s protected from accusations that it’s not science?