Des Moines Register
06-02-07
Tenure denial a clash of science, religion?
Academic freedom evaporates for faculty who support religion
DAVID KLINGHOFFER
Americans like to think of our university system as a haven for unimpeded truthseeking, where tenured professors press the boundaries of knowledge, no holds
barred. The picture is attractive but false when it comes to scholarly
consideration of big questions such as: Is the universe meaningful?
Just ask Iowa State University astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez. His troubling
case is a parable illustrating the limits of academic inquiry, and not only at ISU.
Despite a stellar research record, Gonzalez is being forced out of his job for
expressing his view on a scientific matter possessing religious implications.
In 2004, Gonzalez co-wrote a book called "The Privileged Planet." He argued
that life on Earth and our ability to make scientific discoveries about the cosmos
depend on a host of incredibly improbable planetary conditions, suggesting
intelligent design rather than a cosmic accident.
Gonzalez never taught this material to students. But if he and co-author Jay
Richards are right, then the late astronomer Carl Sagan was wrong when he
mocked our human "delusion that we have some privileged position in the
universe."
Gonzalez was up for tenure this spring at ISU, where 91 percent of tenure
applications in 2007 were approved. In the same season, a religious-studies
teacher, Hector Avalos, was elevated to a full professorship despite wildly antireligious statements in a 2005 book, "Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious
Violence," which compared the Bible unfavorably with Hitler's "Mein Kampf."
Avalos wrote, "Mein Kampf does not contain a single explicit command for
genocide equivalent to those found in the Hebrew Bible."
But it was Gonzalez, not Avalos, who was seen as going too far. In 2005, 120
members of the Iowa State faculty signed a petition targeting Gonzalez, though
not by name, and denouncing intelligent design.
Intelligent design is a blanket term for arguments that a designer directed
nature's evolution. But Gonzalez's research is about astronomy, not biology. In
that research, he shines.
The criteria for tenure in Iowa State's Department of Physics and Astronomy
include a candidate's publication record. According to a Smithsonian/NASA
astrophysics database, Gonzalez's scientific articles from 2001 to 2007 rank the
highest among astronomers in his department, according to a standard measure
of how frequently they have been cited by other scientists. He has published 68
peer-reviewed articles, which beats the department's standard for tenure by 350
percent. He has also co-authored a standard astronomy textbook used by his
faculty colleagues.
Some say he didn't raise enough in research grants. But according to his
department's published criteria, fundraising is not a test for tenure.
So far the university's top academic, Provost Elizabeth Hoffman, has not
intervened to protect Gonzalez's free speech, which is interesting, because her
previous job was as president of the University of Colorado, where she defended
the academic freedom of another embattled professor, Ward Churchill, to write
as he pleased.
Churchill is the famous fellow who penned an essay justifying the deaths of the
victims in the 9/11 attacks, calling those who worked in the World Trade Center
"little Eichmanns."
If the professorial hierarchy at Iowa State doesn't see this case as a challenge to
academic freedom, the context of our times explains why.
With atheist tracts on the bestseller list and the rest of academia aghast at the
heresy of intelligent design in biology, Gonzalez's colleagues must think their
prestige depends on giving no quarter to any hint of support for religion.
At ISU and similarly benighted universities, a scientist who offers such support is
beyond the pale, less acceptable than a scholar who merely compares the dead
of 9/11 to Nazis, or who calls the Bible worse than Hitler. So it goes in the
strange world of the professoriate.
DAVID KLINGHOFFER is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute in Seattle. He
is the author of "Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in Western
History" and other books.