The president of Iowa State University has rejected Guillermo Gonzalez’s appeal for tenure, citing the fact that “he simply did not show the trajectory of excellence that we expect.” That, alas, is the result I expected, and that everyone involved should have expected.
Now, if we expected a rational, productive response from the DI (not that I do), we should see them put down the hammers and nails and peel the poor fellow off the cross they’ve put him on. It’s time for Gonzalez to focus on the future and try to recover from the PR debacle his “friends” at the DI have put him through.
The good people of Iowa and their wonderful university just saved themselves from embarrassment, had the appeal been upheld. It looks like President Geoffroy has acted presidentially and shown the one time scientist turned crank the right path. It is still not too late for Gonzalez. He is a talented guy and should come clean and turn his back once and for all on the disclaimery guys. Otherwise he is going to be one more washout like Kurt Wise, and Billy Boy. OTOH with Gonzalez out of mainstream academia he can find a job with Billy Boy as a moderator. While Gonzalez did some good pre tenure-track work, Billy Boy hasn’t done anything sensible since finishing his dissertation. Billy could throw out the current crop of bozos – Dave-turd, slave’ador, densey, and hire Gonzalez instead.
It is going to be tough for Gonzalez to recover from this, since the whole thing has become political. At this point, he will always have detractors, and—if I may say so—rightly. He pretty much dug his own hole, and by publicly challenging the decision of the tenure board has probably—severely—limited his chances of receiving any positive bias in the science community.
As for ISU, good thing that they stood by their initial decision and did not buckle under stress. Couldn’t have been because of fear of embarassment, though. They are used to that, having lost to Baylor before.
“Iowa State has sponsored $22,661 in outside grant money for Gonzalez since July 2001, records show. In that same time period, Gonzalez’s peers in physics and astronomy secured an average of $1.3 million by the time they were granted tenure.”
If the IDiots really wanted to help secure tenure for Gonzalez, all they would have had to do is give him some research money. If he brought in $10 million or so, he would have gotten tenure in a heartbeat.
ROFL!!! Im using that line the next time I have to break up with a guy.
Now that Gonzalez is officially a martyr for the cause, he can confidently expect a sinecure in some ID-riddled bastion. Perhaps the DI will scrape up some funds to support a “scholar” position at the institute or maybe Dembski can throw his awesome weight around at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary to find Gonzalez a professorship in godly astronomy. It’ll be fun. And easy! (Hint: “God did it” is an acceptable explanation for the seminarians enrolled at SWBTS.)
The DI did grant Gonzalez some money: $50K. A drop in the bucket. The Templeton foundation also gave him some. Neither of those were going to be hot prospects for the future, and probably contributed to the impression of his “trajectory”.
Now that Gonzalez is officially a martyr
but he’s not. clearly ID had nothing to do with his lack of gaining tenure, and he himself earlier claimed his appeal was not based on that (you can even read his denial that ID was involved in his appeal on the DI’s own website).
so, now that he HAS claimed, after the fact, that this was the reason, the only thing you can truthfully say is:
“Now that Gonzalez has officially PAINTED HIMSELF as a martyr…”
he’s no martyr. He’s a fool, who now sees his only option for making any money at all to be the same as Dembski’s was after he made the same fool of himself.
the common thread here isn’t that these people are martyrs for a cause, it’s simply that they are fools.
It’s interesting that there was no mention of the $10,000/year grant for 5 years given by the DI until after the tenure decision was announced in May.
You’d think that if Gonzo had received the grant in, say, January, there would be a great ballyhoo about it.
Why so little, so late?
Ichthyic, I was being ironic.
I agree entirely with what you say. It won’t do any good, though. The “martyr” story will emerge as the dominant complaint from the Discovery Institute and its minions.
ah, irony.
i have too many burned fingers from irony meters exploding all the time since this IDiocy began.
I stopped using them years ago.
sorry.
still, I felt the point needed to be stressed that this in no way is a true case of martyrdom, just like everything else associated with the DI, it is, in Dembski’s own words, best described as:
“Srreet Theater”
This almost makes up for their mascot, Cy the Cyclone, beating ours, Sparty the Spartan, in the recent poorly-done multiple-voting mascot poll. Almost.
Ichthyic’s invocation of the “street theater” reference suddenly put me in mind of the famous old line from a review of a bad play: “The best way to get people into the theater would be to show the play in the street.”
We can modify that a bit, I think, and say, “The best way to get IDers into the lab would be to set up the equipment in the street.”
I suppose everyone here knows about the email campaigns supporting Gonzalez. I just sent an email supporting the denial of tenure. I figure they should hear from both sides.
If it hadn’t been for the Discovery Institute, I’d never have heard about the tenure problem and would have gone about my usual way of dealing with Gonzales (that’s by writing snarky one-liners in the margins of his book whenever I find a copy laying around).
Now, though, I doubt he’ll ever recover.
Yeah, there would be good money in that, too. All right wing pundits are tweaks, and they would feel good about huffing DI Brand Meth.
Gonzalez will do just fine.
He will play the martyr card for all its worth. Quite a lot in his creo circles.
When that hand is played, he will arise from his tomb and accept the accolades of a hero. There are many bible colleges floating around and very few creo astronomers. In fact, he seems to be the only one. Square pegs in square holes. He will also be much, much happier surrounded by god fearing, bible quoting,
moronsfellow travelers, instead of those pesky reality acceptors.Over on UD Dr. Dembski announces the next
martyrinitiative – the creation of the new Evolutionary Informatics Lab at Baylor University by Robert J. Marks II. See: The Evolutionary Informatics Lab Baylor UniversityThe lab’s mission statement includes:
My suspicion is that Dr. Dembski wants to use this work to validate his own NFL/CSI hypotheses. I am not encouraged by Robert J. Marks II recent powerpoint presentation which seems like it uses the Behe style of argument about search algorithms and big numbers, finding a gap to slot externally applied information (the new words for ‘design’, you heard it here first!) into.
I am happy to see this initiative because it appears to be planning to ‘do science’ and can therefore be assessed as science. Still it’s a good thing that Robert J. Marks II is already the “Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering”…
I hope you are right, Bunjo, but I too suspect that the conclusions have been reached in advance of the evidence.
My first reaction to the name was that it was very much like the English horn, which is neither English nor a horn…but anyway, we shall see what comes out of the lab.