Another reason you shouldn’t attend a religiously-affiliated university

Universities are supposed to be places where students are free to think and argue…but too often, if a student says something that contradicts the religious dogma of the institution, it’s an excuse to be censored. Here’s an example: a Mormon student at BYU wrote a letter for the school newspaper criticizing the LDS position on gay rights while still supporting Mormonism as a religious belief.

It is time for LDS supporters of Prop 8 to be honest about their reasons for supporting the amendment. It’s not about adoption rights, or the first amendment, or tradition. These arguments were not found worthy of the standards for finding facts set up by our judicial system. The real reason is that a man who most of us believe is a prophet of God told us to support the amendment. [This is a privately held religious belief that we are using to support legislation that takes away a right from a minority group. If our government were to enact legislation based solely on such beliefs, it would set a dangerous precedent, possibly even more so than allowing a homosexual to marry the person he or she loves.] We must be honest about our motivation, and consider what it means to the delicate balance between our relationship with God and with His children here on earth. Maybe then we will stop thoughtlessly spouting arguments that are offensive to gays and lesbians and indefensible to those not of our faith.

It got pulled. Why? I don’t know. It’s still crazy pro-mormon gushy baloney, but it is simply saying that everyone should be honest about their motivations.

Oh, wait. I forgot. Honesty is one of those sins in these goofy cults.

15 minutes…

I’m about to enter a classroom for the first time in over a year. I feel a strange dread that I’ve forgotten how to teach.

OK, I’m back. I survived. No students passed out. I think it was OK, although it was made more difficult by the fact that it involved a transition from one instructor to another.

Now to do it again this afternoon.

I get to start teaching again this week!

Oh, boy, it’s been a while. I was out for the first few lectures (which I am grateful to my colleagues for covering), so in my introductory biology class I get to plunge straight in to Darwin, Darwin’s finches, and Sean Carroll’s The Making of the Fittest. No preludes, baby, I’m diving right in.

And then I stumble across CreationConversations, which is kind of like the Ask A Biologist website, if it were staffed by idiots. People write in, and the gang there, which seems to be mostly junior league suck-ups to Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis, tries to answer from the Biblical perspective. It’s simply sad and pitiful. Here’s an example of the kinds of questions they get:

I am starting ninth grade biology. I know that we will be learning about evolution. I’ve been doing a lot of reading and have a very solid belief in creation. I was wondering how I should go about talking to my friends and other students about creation and the lie of evolution in and out of the classroom. I’ve tried talking a few times about it with my closest friends and it is sad to see that their beliefs are so firmly rooted in evolution that they have never questioned it. I fear not only for my friends but for my generation seeing as they have been taught nothing but evolution for their entire life. Many of them don’t even believe in God. How can I show not only my friends, but other students, that evolution is wrong?

First of all, I’d have to tell this student he’s living in the paranoid fantasy land of most Christians: it’s highly unlikely, unless he’s at a very good school, that he will be confronted with much evolutionary theory, and the odds that his faith will be challenged at all is vanishingly small. In fact, if he’s perturbed at all, all he has to do is squeak something about Jesus and the teacher will probably run away as fast as possible — not because they’re afraid of your stupid questions, but because obnoxious evangelical parents can make the teacher’s professional life a seething hell.

Also, most of his peers will not have been exposed to much evolution at all, but if they go to church, they’ve probably gotten mega-doses of creationism. There will be no persecution. His biggest disappointment will be that he won’t get to be a martyr.

College, of course, will be an entirely different matter.

The answers he gets at the site are amazing for their semi-delusional thinking: most are entirely confident that they’ve got buckets of apologetics and evidence, and they’re mainly warning the poor kid to go easy on the defenseless evolutionists. They so rarely face serious opposition in the schools that they fantasize that the pile of crap on their site actually has some weight to it; but really, creationists rely completely on cultural intimidation to cow their opposition.

Here’s one representative answer they give:

‘

My counsel is to check your attitude when you decide to confront an issue in class. Be sure that you are humble and respectful of others’ feelings. No one, especially a teacher, likes to look the fool in front of their peers or their students. Since the science controversy is firmly rooted in worldviews, when you begin to deconstruct their presuppositions, they can get defensive. It is far better to sow seeds of doubt and let an issue go, than to argue your point to a crushing conclusion. You may win battles that way, but lose the war, so to speak.

As Justin suggested, be the best possible student you can be. Learn the expected answers, but continually analyze the fallacies and presuppositions purveyed in class. A ninth grade biology course is a survey course, so you will be given a lot of generalizations. Don’t be arrogant or belittling when you decide to question one of these ideas. Look for the underlying truths in what you are learning. You will discover that, unless your teacher or the textbook author(s) are on a mission to convert students to evolution, you probably won’t even discuss it except tangentially in most of the topics.

Awww, how sweet. What this fellow is unaware of is that this poor student has nothing to be arrogant about — if he actually met a teacher who was able and willing to confront his misconceptions, he’d be hung out to dry. The answer also reflects a common creationist myth: the Big Daddy fable, in which the gentle, polite Christian boy humiliates the hysterical, dishonest Evilutionist professor by calmly refuting every piece of evidence brought up in the classroom.

It never happens.

In my experience, the reverse is true. The poor kid gets flustered and his story falls apart in a few moments’ conversation, and he looks like a total dork — I don’t enjoy these situations at all, because then I have to struggle to keep him from abject humiliation while explaining how thoroughly wrong he is. That’s the nasty part of these pro-creation sites that they don’t talk about: they are cheerfully encouraging students to have a false sense of competence, and then shooing them off into the lion’s den to be publicly mauled, while the cowards back at CreationConversations, who are the ones I really would enjoy eviscerating in the classroom, are taking it easy with their back-patting congregations of equally ignorant kooks, lying their asses off to children.

Oh, well. The good news is that students come out of our biology classes here at UMM well-prepared to shred the frauds of creationism.

Another publisher stonewalls on how he screwed up

That ridiculous article on Biblical diagnosis has been officially retracted, and the editor left a comment at Aetiology:

As Editor-in-Chief of Virology Journal I wish to apologize for the publication of the article entitled ”Influenza or not influenza: Analysis of a case of high fever that happened 2000 years ago in Biblical time”, which clearly does not provide the type of robust supporting data required for a case report and does not meet the high standards expected of a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Virology Journal has always operated an exceptionally high standard of thorough peer review; this article has clearly not met these thresholds for balance and supporting data and as such, the article will be retracted. I should like to apologize for any confusion or concern that this article may have caused among our readership, or more widely.

Whilst only ever intended as an opinion piece and also a bit of relief from the ‘normal’ business of the journal, the speculations contained within this article clearly would be better expressed outside the confines of a peer-reviewed journal. Biomed Central does not support any views outlined in this article.

Oh, yes. The usual “We always operate with exceptionally high standards, except this one time” defense. Anyone remember the Warda and Han paper that was even more egregiously ridiculous, claiming that mitochondria were the “missing link between body and soul”? That was also blithely retracted, with no explanation from the journal Proteomics about how the mistake was made.

This is a serious concern, to my mind. Scientists are expected to be open and communicative about their work, explaining all the details about how we achieve our results. Yet then we hand that work over to a publisher (usually a for-profit organization), where it is subjected to an arcane process cloaked in mystery that they call peer review. And every once in a while, some strange fluke exposes the inherently arbitrary and chaotic nature of that process, everyone asks “how the hell did that get published?”, and some guy in a business suit steps out to unconvincingly tell us “oops” and reassure us that all is well in the machineries of their journal.

I don’t think it’s enough. If a publisher wants to manage this profitable business of publishing science journals, there ought to be an expectation of transparency — a fuller explanation of how submissions are handled, and when mistakes are made, a more thorough explanation of exactly how it happened. Without an open explanation of how such mistakes occur, I can’t have any confidence that efforts will be made to correct the process that led to them.

And it’s not just the journals. Scientists have to have some expectation of rigor. The author of the retracted Virology Journal has also tried to explain what he was doing.

I was astonished that our article, submitted initially in the debate section of the journal, had stirred up such negative publicity. As an article for debate, there was no absolute right or wrong answer, and the article was only meant for thought provocation. Neither was it meant to be a debate on the concept of miracles. My only focus at the time of writing was “what had caused the fever and debilitation” that was cured by Jesus. I was especially astonished that so many comments were made outside the scope of the journal. In medical writing, colleagues would usually make comments in the “letter to the editors” and the authors would respond in the subsequent correspondence.

He’s astonished? I’m astonished! It was an epically bad paper, using very poor data to draw a completely unjustified conclusion. If he’s going to waffle now about there being no right or wrong answer, then he shouldn’t use the pages of a peer-reviewed journal to conjure up an unsupportable answer. Can this man even think scientifically?

I am amused at the protest that comments were made outside the traditional protected filters of the journal itself. That’s such a genteel expectation: that one can screw up royally, and then because one is a member of a formal organization, all criticisms will be processed and massaged by an editorial staff, one will have an opportunity to restrict and reply to only those bits that are properly phrased in a mannerly mannered manner, and that everything will be officially published in a way to enhance one’s standing as a respected colleague. Thus can pompous twits find perpetual reinforcement of their status.

Well, screw that.

The world has got to change for science publishing. No more ivory tower isolation, no more confinement of ideas to a narrow set of mutually reinforcing academic cronies — write something really stupid, and we have ways to drag it out into the light of day, where a hundred thousand people will laugh at it and tear it apart.

Now we know the price of academic freedom at St John’s University

It’s $20,000.

St John’s is a very nice, private Catholic college not too far down the road from us. They also have a program named after our celebrated liberal Minnesota politician and alumnus, Eugene McCarthy, the Eugene J. McCarthy Center for Public Policy & Civic Engagement, which has a Senior Fellows program to bring in new and interesting people to the community. So you’d think they’d be good guys; I’ve had a good opinion of them for some time. That’s changing fast.

One of the Senior Fellows they recently appointed was Nick Coleman, formerly a well-known columnist at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, one of those old school working class liberal writers with an assertive tone which, as you might guess, I liked, but which conservatives found abrasive. So far, so good: Coleman plus St John’s sounded like a good combination.

But then St John’s decided not to extend his contract.

Why, you might wonder. It’s easy: Coleman, popular liberal columnist, annoyed a few conservative donors to the school. One, Bob Labat, “a 1959 St. John’s grad who has donated to the school every year since”, thought Coleman was “grating” and “caustic” and “inappropriate” for a Catholic school.

Another, Len Busch, “who has given $20,000 to the St. John’s theology department each of the last three years” objected to the fact that Coleman dared to criticize corporations and our Republican sleazebag governor, Tim Pawlenty. Notice that his donations are exclusively to the theology department, which gives him the clout to dictate who can be in the department of public policy.

Labat and Busch announced that they would make no further donations to the university, and St John’s caved in. I guess donors to Catholic theology have bought out the integrity of the college.

Catholicism has compromised them in more ways than one. The university has an associated Benedictine monastery, which has a — can you guess? — history of housing pedophile priests. But then, we all just take that for granted at Catholic institutions nowadays, anyway.

NPR is a faith-based organization

I blame Barbara Bradley Hagerty — or at least, she is the face of religious inanity at NPR. She has a new piece up titled Christian Academics Cite Hostility On Campus, and does she have any evidence for this claim? None at all. Actually, she has evidence contradicting the claim.

There are two parts to the story. The first is someone who is fast becoming a usual suspect, Elaine Howard Ecklund, the person who studied faith among academics and was surprisingly surprised to discover that, golly gee whiz, nearly half go to church! This is a fact that is only news if you’ve bought into the biased view that academics are a monolithic bunch who are not only all atheists, but are also all communists, hippies, and Democrats. How the fact that a very significant minority of academics are religious argues that Christianity is oppressed on campus is a mystery.

So she moves on to pointing out that most of the religious academics are quiet about it; there’s a serious shortage of proselytizing evangelicals on the faculty. This, too, is a mystery to Ecklund, but shouldn’t be. Academics tend to be smart people. Evangelical/Charismatic/Fundamentalist religions are stupid. Figure it out.

Ecklund is also annoying because she is constantly harping on her thesis that higher education doesn’t erode faith, when the proper way to look at her data is to notice that more than half are freethinkers.

If you thought that was feeble, wait until you see the second part. They had to go looking for an evangelical Christian who has suffered discrimination for his faith, and who did they get? Mike S. Adams. That’s the most horrendous example of religious discrimination they could find? A far right lunatic who was tenured at his university but failed in his attempt at promotion to full professor?

Come on. Once upon a time when Christians complained about persecution, it was because a few of their members were getting fed to bears or getting nailed upside down to a stick…and now they’re reduced to squeaking about a college professor not getting a promotion?

I shall be looking forward to my massive pay raise

Zeno catches something amusing: a right-wing radio host ranting about professors.

Sussman:I get a kick out of— You go to UC Berkeley, you go to Stanford, you go to these various campuses and these students are out there protesting, “We need more money for our schools!” And standing next to them are the professors. “We need more money for our schools!” Hey, have you ever asked that professor how much money they’re making every year? These professors are all millionaires. They’re millionaires with big, big salaries and big, big retirement packages. And yet they dress like little schmoes, you know, with their crummy jackets [Officer Vic: Patches on the elbow.] that are twenty years old, yeah, and patches on the elbow. And their ties are askew and their hair’s kinda crappy and they drive crummy little cars and they’re millionaires. They’re all millionaires! And they actually have the gall to stand next to the kids who are protesting because their fees are too high. “We need more money for our schools!” So you can pay these millionaires!

Reality doesn’t matter to these guys, does it? We wear the crummy jackets and drive the crummy little cars because that’s what we can afford: professors are proud members of the middle class, not even the upper middle class. It isn’t pretense.

I’m also not really getting a pay raise. In Minnesota, we’re getting a pay cut this year.

Creationists are geniuses

Really, they are. A while back, the Institute for Creation Research moved to Texas, where they expected a friendly welcome, and instead they got spanked: their request to be allowed to hand out degrees was turned down by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. This made the ICR angry, and they made a wacky lawsuit. A genuinely deranged brief. Their minds work in very twisty weird ways.

They’ve gone down in flames — they are not authorized to give out degrees. But those creationist brains that scuttle sideways and inside out are not daunted by this mere legal restriction! Their website now proudly proclaims that they offer a Master of Christian Education (M.C.Ed.) degree. How can they do that?

11. Is ICR’s School of Biblical Apologetics program accredited?

Due to the nature of ICR’s School of Biblical Apologetics—a predominantly religious education school—it is exempt from licensing by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. Likewise, ICR’s School of Biblical Apologetics is legally exempt from being required to be accredited by any secular or ecumenical or other type of accrediting association.

That’s freakin’ brilliant. Are they offering accredited degrees? NO. The THECB refused to license them. But instead of saying that, they cleverly dodge the question. Imagine some poor gullible teacher suckered into getting a Masters in “Christian Education”, and then going back to her school administrators and waving her diploma around to justify getting a promotion.

“Is that an accredited degree from a licensed university?”

“They are exempt from licensing.”

“So it’s not licensed…is it accredited?”

“They are legally exempt from being required to be accredited.”

“So it’s not accredited.”

“WHERE’S MAH RAISE?”

Mike S. Adams, bad professor

The Supreme Court recently decided that campus student groups do not have to be subsidized by the university if they discriminate — so, for instance, the campus Christian club can’t refuse to admit gays and also collect university money. Perfectly reasonable, to my mind.

It’s driving flitterbrained conservatives mad, though. They can’t discriminate? Injustice! Perhaps one of the craziest is Mike Adams, who has announced his intention to abuse the ruling at UNC Wilmington.

…when I get back to the secular university in August, I plan to round up the students I know who are most hostile to atheism. Then I’m going to get them to help me find atheist-haters willing to join atheist student groups across the South. I plan to use my young fundamentalist Christian warriors to undermine the mission of every group that disagrees with me on the existence of God.

What a coincidence — I’m hoping to restart the UMM Freethinkers group this August, too. I can’t quite imagine bringing together students interested in atheism/agnosticism/secularism and telling them our plan is for them to join Christian groups instead, and become pests and troublemakers. That plan is just bizarre, and a disservice to the honest discussion of the issues…and a disservice to the students. Mike Adams doesn’t care!

That means an invading group can turn a smaller, weaker group into second class citizens on campus. That’s what I intend to do to those groups who do not believe in God.

This could get really interesting. It’s not just the students who’ll be annoyed; there’s this little thing called ‘collegiality’, where we have to work together with our fellow faculty. And those faculty may be advising some of those other groups. I can just imagine what would happen if I tried to turn freethinkers on campus into militant disruptors of other organizations: their faculty advisors would descend on me in fury. I might even suddenly find myself nominated and elected to serve on some of the more tedious committees on campus.

And here’s the kicker:

I do not seek robust debate. I seek power over the godless heathen dissident.

This guy actually works at a university? Madness.

By the way, if any Christians or Muslims want to join the UMM Freethinkers, they’d be welcome. We like debate. It would make the meetings lively.

It’s the faculty who define a university

Unfortunately, it’s the administrators who shape the faculty, and they too often lose sight of the purpose of their institution. Here’s Eva von Dassow trying to remind the UM regents of their job.

Uh-oh. Von Dassow is in one of those liberal artsy departments, Classics and Near East Studies at the University of Minnesota. Now somebody up top is probably scrutinizing that academic unit and measuring its revenue generation, which, of course, is the true measure of a scholarly endeavor.

(via Left of Centre.)