This week’s Nature has a short report on the Gonzalez tenure affair. It has an interesting admission from Gonzalez.
Gonzalez, who has been at Iowa State in Ames since 2001, was denied tenure on 9 March. He is now appealing the decision on the grounds that his religious belief, not the quality of his science, was the basis for turning down his application. “I’m concerned my views on intelligent design were a factor,” he says.
His “views on intelligent design” were his “religious belief”? OK, that’s good enough for me. No tenure.
It also includes comments from Bob Park, which reflect my own views on this—his ID ideas were fair game for the tenure review.
But Park says that a researcher’s views on intelligent design cannot be divorced from the tenure decision. Anyone who believes that an intelligent force set the Earth’s location doesn’t understand probability’s role in the Universe, Park argues. Such a person is hardly qualified to teach others about the scientific method. “We’re entrusting the minds of our students to this person,” he says.
And there’s also the best informed person on this topic, the chair of the department.
Eli Rosenberg, who chairs Iowa State’s physics department, concedes that Gonzalez’s belief in intelligent design did come up during the tenure process. “I’d be a fool if I said it was not [discussed],” he says. But, he adds, “intelligent design was not a major or even a big factor in this decision.” Four of twelve tenure candidates have been turned down in the past decade, he says. “We are a fairly hard-nosed department.”
Brumfiel G (2007) Darwin sceptic says views cost tenure. Nature, published online: 23 May 2007.
I believe you could find quotes from Gonzalez that ID is science, not religion. This is pretty close:
Is intelligent design science?
On the one hand, I’m certain that it was because of Gonzales’ lack of doing anything productive that resulted in him being denied tenure.
On the other hand, you don’t suppose it was his belief in intelligent design that lead him to do nothing productive in the first place?
The question of whether or not to grant Mr. Gonzalez tenure should have been pretty simple. Let’s assert that as a citizen he’s entitled to his private religious beliefs. However, when he consistently favors those beliefs over the scientific method, his scientific credentials become suspect. When he ignores a vast accumulation of data and evidence just because he has blind faith–based only on his reading of a single nonverifiable source whose falsifiability he will not accept–that the scientific record must be wrong, he proves himself to be incapable of imparting the prevailing scientific “culture” to his students. Why would any respectable university want to give its imprimatur to such an individual?
If he were an English literature professor, would he be given tenure if he insisted that the works of Shakespeare had actually been written in one day by god? If he were a history professor, would he be given tenure if he taught his students that the U.S. Constitution had literally been dictated by Jesus? If he were teaching medicine, would he be given tenure if he swore that all illnesses are caused by Satan and can be cured only by prayer?
These examples are ridiculous, but no more so than Gonzalez’s belief in ID. He’s not being discriminated against because of his beliefs in religion, but because of his lack of belief in the basic methodology of the very field in which he claims to be an expert. Bravo to Iowa State. Mr. Gonzalez should find work as a docent at the Creation Museum.
I’m not an academic or a teacher, but granting tenure to eight out of twelve applicants is “hard-nosed”? Really? If tenure candidates are batting .667, I’d like my chances as an applicant in that department.
(Assuming I actually did new research, unlike Gonzalez.)
This is what I’ve been thinking all along. A scientist who advocates ID is simple an inept scientist, and thus does not deserve tenure. If they advocate ID, they don’t understand science.
Somewhere at Cornell Hannah Maxson is desperately trying to figure out how to erase all her pathetic bullshit from the internet.
Ahh, the irony here is delicious. The ID movement is premised on the (absurd) claim that ID methodology and conclusions are purely scientific, and as such should be taken seriously by the scientific community. The committee that declined Gonzalez’ tenure apparently found the scientific merits of ID to be rather… underwhelming, shall we say. For Gonzalez to then turn around and complain that he has been the victim of religious bias on the basis of his endorsement of ID is thus to let the cat out of the bag: that ID is based on something other than purely scientific assumptions. This really is quite wonderful. I say we encourage Gonzalez to fight the tenure decision for all he’s worth, so he can help expose the IDist’s dirty little secret for everyone to see.
Let’s be fair: a scientist could forward ID as a religious position but accurately state that it’s not science.
They’d still be impaired by making an exception in their thoughts for religious positions, but at least they’d be correct in stating the nature of science. They don’t necessarily have to apply it uniformly to know what it is.
Let’s be fair
Actually let’s get back to dropping piles of fresh dung onto the corpse of Gonzalez’s pathetic dream of being tenured.
[plplplplplplpplrrrrrrrt!!!!!]
His “views on intelligent design” were his “religious belief”? OK, that’s good enough for me.
Um, really PZ, to be fair, or even in the ballpark of fair, it must be pointed out that that’s Nature’s characterization. To ding Gonzalez for that is a bit like Cheney quoting Miller about WMD’s in Iraq.
you don’t suppose it was his belief in intelligent design that lead him to do nothing productive in the first place?
Stop it , stop it, STOP IT! Has the whole human race lost its collective memory with the advent of the spell checker? The past tense of “lead” is LED!! Arrgggh!!!!
Fishy, you gotta make it to the majors to get a chance to bat.
Thank you, Dr. G!
That’s the most significant thing you’ve contributed to science: ID is a religious proposition.
I propose that Guillermo Gonzalez, DI proclaimed “ID Astronomer” be awarded the first Judge John E. Jones Citation for Service to Science Education.
I doubt you will find someone more militantly atheistic that me…
…But not to let the facts get in the way of a good story, a quick google search indicates something like 68 peer-reviewed journals, 33 as first author. And there are articles in Science and Nature profiling his non-ID work.
This is a person who, apparently, has made large contributions to the field in refereed journals. The fact that he has crazy views in other fields is completely irrelevant.
If someone wants to say that 68 articles is below average or something like that, I’ll listen, but denying a good scholar tenure because you disagree with his unrelated views is bullshit McCarthyism.
(P.S. They guy sounds like a jackass. However, that is not grounds for denying tenure. If it was, precious few of us would get it.)
Nota bene:
I just wanted to clarify. If someone shows that, by the standards of the profession, Gonzalez’s work in astrophysics is substandard or that he is, on average, less productive, then I that is a perfectly reasonable argument to make. May be true or may not be, I don’t know (presumably the tenure committee does, though that seems like a fairly prodigious output, especially to a philosopher like myself but science does have different standards).
But the idea that a good scholar in astrophysics should be denied tenure because he has unpopular views despite being published in peer-reviewed literature is beyond ridiculous. And that’s true even if the guy is a jackass and publishes his crazy views in other presses.
Patrick – I think the problem is that Gonzalez did most of his work before he arrived at Iowa. From his list of publications (warning: DI pdf), here’s a list of the dates of his peer-reviewed publications:
Year No. First author
1987 1 1
…
1992 3 2
1993 0 0
1994 3 2
1995 0 0
1996 3 2
1997 7 5
1998 8 4
1999 10 6
2000 6 3
2001 6 2 ISU
2002 4 0
2003 6 1
2004 2 0 PP
2005 3 1
2006 4 4
(there’s also 1 for 2007, and 1 in press. ISU: Gonzalez joined Iowa State Uni., PP: The Privileged Planet published)
So, it look like he did most of his work in the mid to late 1990s. I would expect that someone becoming an assistant professor would improve their rate of publication, as they (a) are more experienced at writing papers, and (b) get students and post docs into their group. I certainly wouldn’t expect productivity to decrease.
Bob
Just to add onto Bob’s comment — it appears that many of the papers Gonzalez published while at ISU were actually from his postdoc work. Thus, he actually generated very little new research during his time at ISU (and he obtained no research grants). That’s not a recipe for tenure at any research institution, no matter the quality of one’s prior work.
Even if he was a highly productive scientist prior to the tenure decision making process surely the fear of him dropping all real science and doing a Behe is sufficient justification for being wary of granting tenure. The fact he was not productive nor grant laden makes this a moot point however.
Is there a summary somewhere of what he did while at ISU – papers published, papers based on work there, grant money obtained, students supervised – other relevant data and what is actually expected/required to attain tenure?
Patrick said: “you disagree with his unrelated views”
That’s exactly the problem: they aren’t unrelated. He holds batshit-wacko views that are related to his field of expertise, in fact that are about his field of expertise. This shows that he doesn’t have a full grasp on his own field and thus the denial of tenure is warranted.
There is some more analysis of GG’s scolarship here: http://72.32.2.238/forumlive/showthread.php?p=2623600#post2623600 scroll up and down a bit. I looked at the department’s list of students, and GG seems to have had none. Also, in addition to not getting any grant support (except to write his misguided book), he didn’t have use of a significant telescope.
Lack of scholarship coupled with an avid interest in non-science is a strong indicator that he will do a Behe if given tenure.
For some reason I am reminded of Miller’s quantum woo. :-|
For some reason I am reminded of Miller’s quantum woo. :-|
Sorry Patrick, but you’ve fallen for the bait-and-switch. Gonzalez claimed that ID was legitimate science, and that Privileged Planet was legitimate astronomy. It is only recently that he claims otherwise, as he wishes to imply religious discrimination on the part of his employer.
As a professional astronomer only slightly younger that GG (disclosuse: I few years ago I argued with him about his claims GHZ’s and his links with the DI, so he ain’t my favorite person), I’d like to follow up on Patrick’s comment #14 (and the excellent follow-ups by others) on GG’s publication record and the tenure decision.
Firstly, the publication record is (as others including PZ have said) only ONE aspect of many that a tenure panel must consider. Frankly I think that even if his publication record was as good as required for tenure, there are other fundamental issues regarding his beliefs and how they (IMHO) distort the conclusions he draws regarding the so-called “Galactic Habitable Zone” that would give a committee cause for real concern. However, let us just consider the publication record.
Secondly, if you want to personally investigate his publication record it must done bearing in mind that there are other Guillermo Gonzalez’s in astronomy that will contaminate a search using Google Scholar or even the NASA ADS system. You also have to make sure to include only refereed publications, and exclude magazines, preprints, etc.
Thirdly, his publication record since starting tenure-track at Iowa is really surprisingly weak in several ways (as compared to his earlier work, or compared to the average publication rate of my peers). They tend to be short, a few pages at most, or short review-type articles (which are easy to produce and require little-or-no original research).
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s article on the GG issue mentioned Hirch’s h-index, which is a currently popular (if not perfect) method of assessing a publication record. GG’s lifetime h-index is 13 to 19 (13 in the chronicle, I calcuated 19 using “publish or perish”), and the chronicle claims that h >= 10 is sort of the level needed if you want to get tenure (I can’t assess if this is true as I’m not tenure or on tenure track). But they note that his recent publication record is weaker, and when I calculate GG’h h-index over the period 2002-2007 (when his papers carry attribution to being at Iowa) I get h=6, supporting the view that his recent record is genuinely weaker and perhaps sub-par. To be fair, h is constructed in such a way that your lifetime h will be greater than your recent h index, but experimenting on my own publication record suggests to me that the recent drop in GG’s h-index is not due to the way h is evaluated.
As a professional astronomer only slightly younger that GG (disclosuse: I few years ago I argued with him about his claims GHZ’s and his links with the DI, so he ain’t my favorite person), I’d like to follow up on Patrick’s comment #14 (and the excellent follow-ups by others) on GG’s publication record and the tenure decision.
Firstly, the publication record is (as others including PZ have said) only ONE aspect of many that a tenure panel must consider. Frankly I think that even if his publication record was as good as required for tenure, there are other fundamental issues regarding his beliefs and how they (IMHO) distort the conclusions he draws regarding the so-called “Galactic Habitable Zone” that would give a committee cause for real concern. However, let us just consider the publication record.
Secondly, if you want to personally investigate his publication record it must done bearing in mind that there are other Guillermo Gonzalez’s in astronomy that will contaminate a search using Google Scholar or even the NASA ADS system. You also have to make sure to include only refereed publications, and exclude magazines, preprints, etc.
Thirdly, his publication record since starting tenure-track at Iowa is really surprisingly weak in several ways (as compared to his earlier work, or compared to the average publication rate of my peers). They tend to be short, a few pages at most, or short review-type articles (which are easy to produce and require little-or-no original research).
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s article on the GG issue mentioned Hirch’s h-index, which is a currently popular (if not perfect) method of assessing a publication record. GG’s lifetime h-index is 13 to 19 (13 in the chronicle, I calcuated 19 using “publish or perish”), and the chronicle claims that h >= 10 is sort of the level needed if you want to get tenure (I can’t assess if this is true as I’m not tenure or on tenure track). But they note that his recent publication record is weaker, and when I calculate GG’h h-index over the period 2002-2007 (when his papers carry attribution to being at Iowa) I get h=6, supporting the view that his recent record is genuinely weaker and perhaps sub-par. To be fair, h is constructed in such a way that your lifetime h will be greater than your recent h index, but experimenting on my own publication record suggests to me that the recent drop in GG’s h-index is not due to the way h is evaluated.
Thanks, Dave, for the comments. I’m glad someone who is in the field can comment. I have discussed his publication list in other places, but it is always from a perspective of another scientific field, and therefore I am projecting a bit. Thus, I would not be on the departmental committee to evaluate the case, but I could, in principle, be on the college level promotions committee that has to see it.
One comment that I would add to your analysis is that his h rating does not take into account his _independent_ career, and gives him credit for publications still coming out in collaboration with his grad school and post-doc advisers. I know that those publications would have very little weight in a tenure decision, which is predicated on evidence for independent research success. In my department, publications co-authored by a former research adviser are not considered with any regard. Would you say the same for your field?
Second, I have argued based on his publication record that he has not demonstrated success in acquiring telescope access, and that hurts his case significantly because getting telescope time is critical for an astronomer. Admittedly, this is a projection on my part, and perhaps you could comment on its legitimacy.
@Dave S.
If you go to the Discovery Institute link, indirectly cited in my previous post, you can get GG’s pub list. Then, subtract anything co-authored by Wallerstein, who was his grad adviser, and Lambert who was his post-doc adviser. That leaves his independent pubs.
I also appreciate your input.
@Dave S.
If you go to the Discovery Institute link, indirectly cited in my previous post, you can get GG’s pub list. Then, subtract anything co-authored by Wallerstein, who was his grad adviser, and Lambert who was his post-doc adviser. That leaves his independent pubs.
I also appreciate your input.