Des Moines Register
12-01-07
Intelligent design theory influenced ISU tenure vote
By LISA ROSSI • REGISTER AMES BUREAU • December 1, 2007
Ames, Ia. - Iowa State University professor Guillermo Gonzalez's support of the theory of intelligent design damaged his prospects for tenure long before his peers voted on the job promotion, according to e-mails from at least one professor in his department to those who decided Gonzalez's tenure request.
The e-mails were provided to The Des Moines Register by ISU officials in response to a request for public records pertaining to the tenure case.
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The disclosure of the e-mails is contrary to what ISU officials emphasized after
Gonzalez, an assistant professor in physics and astronomy , learned that his university colleagues had voted to deny his bid for tenure.
"I think Gonzalez should know that some of the faculty in his department are not going to count his ID work as a plus for tenure," physics and astronomy professor
Bruce Harmon wrote in an e-mail dated November 2005 - a year before the department voted on the tenure case.
"Quite the opposite," Harmon added.
In May, Eli Rosenberg, chairman of the ISU Department of Physics and
Astronomy , told the Register that Gonzalez's tenure denial was "not political" and that journalists were wrong to suggest that Gonzalez's tenure review was based on anything other than his scientific qualifications.
Later that month, however, Rosenberg told World Magazine, a Christian publication, that Gonzalez's book, called "The Privileged Planet," played a role in the tenure decision-making process. But the book was not an overriding factor,
Rosenberg added.
Tenure basically gives a faculty member a lifetime job at Iowa State University.
Gonzalez's backers have insisted that he lost out on tenure, and will lose his job at the end of the school year, because of his religious beliefs and his advocacy for intelligent design.
Intelligent design is a theory that disputes parts of the theory of evolution.

Gonzalez has said he does not teach intelligent design in his ISU classes, nor did he include mention of his views on the concept in his resume, his colleagues said.
After the final tenure decision earlier this year, leaders in the physics and astronomy department pointed to Gonzalez's lackluster ability to raise money for research as a major reason for rejecting his bid for tenure.
Tenured professors in the physics and astronomy department voted on
Gonzalez's tenure request in November 2006.
John McCarroll, ISU executive director of university relations , said he did not know the individual feelings of voting faculty members until the e-mails surfaced as a part of a public-records request filed by the Discovery Institute, an advocate on behalf of Gonzalez.
In response to a question about why the influence of intelligent design in the physics and astronomy tenure decisions was not acknowledged publicly by the university earlier, McCarroll said, "I can't speak for every one of those individuals" who voted on Gonzalez's tenure.
After the vote, a dossier on Gonzalez that summarized the physics and astronomy faculty decision went to the other university administrators that weighed in on his tenure application. Those documents included "a few words about intelligent design at the end, and that's it," Rosenberg said.
Harmon acknowledged in an interview Thursday that Gonzalez's support for intelligent design was part of the tenure discussions among his ISU colleagues.
Rosenberg agreed with that statement in an interview Friday.
"It was a consideration, I think," Harmon said.
He added later that 80 percent to 90 percent of the discussion on whether to grant Gonzalez tenure was based on his astronomy, but "it's impossible to have this big elephant in the room without a burp occasionally, so it may have surfaced, but I don't think it was that strong," Harmon said.
Rosenberg, who did not vote in the tenure decision but issued a separate recommendation as chairman of the department, said the tenure discussions included comments on whether Gonzalez thought intelligent design was science, which Rosenberg said he thought he did.
"Would you have somebody in a French department who said Spanish was
French?" Rosenberg asked.

The National Academy of Sciences is among the national science organizations that have shunned the idea that intelligent design is legitimate science.
The Discovery Institute, an organization based in Seattle, has defended
Gonzalez. The organization says intelligent design proposes that some features of living things and the universe are best explained as the products of an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection and random mutation.
The institute also supports the discussion of intelligent design in science classrooms.
Harmon was among those who began to worry about Gonzalez's public advocacy after "The Privileged Planet," a film on intelligent design based on the book by Gonzalez and Jay Richards of the Discovery Institute, was played in a theater at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.
According to ISU records made public this week, a year before the tenure vote,
Harmon debated in e-mail with some of his colleagues whether to draft a statement signed by scientists from the physics and astronomy department saying intelligent design is not a science and should not be taught in science classes.
Harmon wrote that job candidates had been calling asking about the climate of the department relative to intelligent design.
In another e-mail made public this week, Steve Kawaler, a physics and astronomy professor , cautioned against distributing such a statement. He wrote, "An unprecedented step such as a statement, signed by members of the department doing the tenure review that the science being done by the candidate is no good, works directly against our need to ensure, and display a fair tenure review."
Harmon ultimately decided not to distribute the statement. A statement unaffiliated with the physics and astronomy department was later distributed with the help of Hector Avalos, an ISU professor of philosophy and religious studies . That statement included signatures from ISU faculty members who opposed the teaching of intelligent design as science.
Other faculty members defended Gonzalez in e-mails.
John Hauptman, an ISU professor of physics and astronomy , wrote in an email in December 2005 in response to a critic of Gonzalez's that "this is starting to smack of a witch's hanging."

"Gonzalez will do what he likes, whether anyone else likes it or not, and a tenure decision will be made should Guillermo choose to be considered. ... I find it distasteful that a mob feels it necessary to beat up on a guy because they do not like what he is doing. I will make my judgment, but it will not be part of a public hanging," he wrote.
Hauptman ultimately voted against Gonzalez's tenure bid, a vote he disclosed in a column that ran in the Des Moines Register opinion pages in June.
Scientists in Gonzalez's department struggled to find other ways to communicate their concern with him.
Curtis Struck, a physics and astronomy professor , wrote an e-mail to Lee
Anne Willson, another physics and astronomy professor , in February 2004 noting that Gonzalez was about to publish a book on intelligent design.
"I guess I'm rather sad that he wants to be so very public about something that I see as intellectually vacuous, though it may be spiritually satisfying," Struck wrote. "I think I will talk to him about it at some point."
Willson responded that she urged Gonzalez to wait with the "public bit" until after the tenure review.
"He's definitely a mixed bag," she wrote. "At least it will get full daylight at the three-year review."
Willson also said that intelligent design was more than just vacuous, and that
Gonzalez was "supporting a movement that is endangering science, although I'm sure he doesn't see it that way. The organization(s) that sponsor this work are also busy in the courts challenging evolution."
Reporter Lisa Rossi can be reached at (515) 232-2383 or lrossi@dmreg.com