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Christians should be eradicated?

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One should perhaps be posting other news on a Thursday, but Barry Arrington’s interesting item about the slight lessening of persecution of Christians in Canada here prompts me to say, many Christians worldwide have lived with irrational hatred of Christians for a long time.

Most Americans rarely notice what is happening in Canada (or any other country). So it might not hurt to suggest that American Christian readers will presently face what Canadian (serious) Christians and (observant) Jews have struggled with for some years. We fought the battle for you. Our compliments.

Now you must join: Here we learn that Christians are a waste of good air in the United States, apparently:

The sociologists, who define Christianophobia as “unreasonable hatred or fear of Christians,” argue that it’s worth exploring potential intense bias against Christians, as it helps readers understand the “social dynamics” that exist in the U.S., according to an official book description.

As far as how prevalent the problem truly is, Yancey told the Christian Post that it’s really a small group of people that hold strong hostility, though that group is comprised of elite individuals with more societal power than the average person.

Yancey said that he and his co-author were motivated to explore potential Christianophonia after they began collecting qualitative data from interviews with liberal activists and noticed a troubling trend among a certain subset of these respondents.

By the way, I don’t think people should be dealing with a Canadian bank that sponsors persecution of Christians.

The good news: The problem created in the world’s most beautiful country (where we welcome all who come in – actual – peace) by the joint attack of Islamists and new atheists forged meaningful links between modern Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

It finally became possible to talk beyond the secular burkha of political correctness.

Specific convictions divide us but, it turned out, what unites us is the promise of a new country, a way to walk away from an oppressive past. Maybe all this means nothing to you:

And maybe this means more:

But note to visiting Yanks: If you do NOT understand what we mean by “the True North strong and free,” please sober up and then take the next flight out.

We will help if we can. It has meant a lot to us, but of course we would never presume to detain you for just being too dumb to get what is at stake.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

 

Comments
skram: Obviously, I misunderstood certain phrases in your comments on research universities. I am glad to hear that the situation for teaching is not as bad as what I inferred from your remarks. Anyhow, I hope I made clear that I don't really care where Gonzalez ended up teaching; my point was that a man with that level of training and accomplishment has *earned* a permanent academic job *somewhere* -- even if not at ISU. Regarding telescopes etc. I don't know what to say. I never suggested that the only telescope in all of the USA should be in Arizona. In fact, there are many excellent telescope facilities across the USA, both optical and radio telescopes. Nor did I say that no one from one university should ever use the more specialized facilities of another university or observatory where appropriate. Of course that should sometimes happen. What I said was that an astronomy/astrophysics department whose research is *heavily observational* -- as opposed to theoretical -- in its focus ought to have its own observational facilities, to make sure that all the faculty that it hires (at great expense) can do the work they were hired to do. The facilities need not be in downtown New York, of course. There are country spots in New York State where a Columbia astronomer could go to a Columbia-owned facility. Or maybe Columbia and Cornell and Yale and Rutgers and Harvard could all share the cost of one New England observatory, and set things up so that there is adequate observation time for *all* of the faculty at *all* the participating universities, so that the astronomers aren't cutting each others' throats in a Darwinian struggle for telescope time. And I still don't understand why *all* astronomical research has to have the most expensive telescope in the world. There are all kinds of things one can observe about the light of stars, etc. in telescopes that are less than the very best in the world. It is not as if every astronomer in the world has to travel to Texas to use the facility referenced above. There are good telescopes, both optical and radio, at Mt. Palomar, Mt. Wilson, and many other places. There are also satellites and interplanetary vehicles taking pictures of the heavens all the time, pictures which reveal much more than any earthbound telescope can, and sending those pictures back to earth, creating interpretive work for thousands of astronomers and astrophysicists. If you are analyzing the pictures from the latest probe that landed on a comet, you don't need a telescope. You can't see the comet close up on the telescope, anyway; you need the lander's pictures for that. I already granted you the point about large facilities like the Hadron collider. But many universities have smaller, less powerful particle accelerators, which are perfectly adequate *for the research that their users are trying to do*. I knew many physicists, both post-docs and grad students, who used the particle accelerator on campus frequently. They never talked about any difficulty of access to the facilities. They all seemed to have plenty of time to collect their data. I never heard of even one case where someone said: "Poor old Joe! He came here to do a Ph.D. in particle physics, but he couldn't finish his degree because he wasn't granted enough accelerator time!" Nor did I hear of any case where anything like that happened to a post-doc or faculty member. Obviously, they made sure, when they invited grad students, post-docs, and faculty members to come and do nuclear physics there, that there was enough access time available for all. It can be done, with competent management. But science administration is not a subject of burning importance for me. My main point was that there *is* a prejudice -- documented -- against scientists -- tenured or untenured -- who have indicated any support at all for ID. And there are at least some people out there who are sabotaging the careers of young scientists who have endorsed ID. Even if that isn't what happened in the case of Gonzalez -- which remains open to doubt -- it certainly happens in the life sciences. I correspond frequently with scores of Ph.D.s in the life science fields, and I know this is happening. Maybe most of your friends in astronomy and physics are morally and professionally pure and would never dream of destroying the career of an otherwise very good physicist or astronomer merely because he accepts cosmic fine-tuning; but I can tell you that there are biologists and biochemists who would "do in" -- and have "done in" people in those fields sympathetic to ID. Some of these cases are documented in books and articles; others are known to those behind the scenes, and can't be talked about as freely because in some cases there is still some faint hope for the ID person of getting a job if he/she maintains silence from now on. The point is that such self-censorship is not and cannot be healthy for natural science. A scientist should be able to state in public if he/she thinks the biological data warrants an inference of design, without fear of losing a scientific career, provided that the scientist in question has a track record of producing peer-reviewed research that would in other circumstances win tenure and research funding. If the biologists and biochemists who control hiring and tenure in America's life science world aren't intellectually big enough to accept as a colleague a professor who disagrees with them over design, they aren't true scientists, researchers, or thinkers, but merely reductionist, materialist ideologues using the label of "science" to promote their ideology. A true scholar, a true scientist, fears no idea, censors no idea, punishes no one for holding an idea. Challenging the idea (whether it's ID or anything else) is fine, but punishing the person who holds it merely because one does not like the idea (because one is committed personally to atheism, materialism, and reductionism, and if there is design in the universe all those positions are threatened) is a dishonorable and unprofessional thing for any scientist to do. Far better than the militant and aggressive attitude of our modern atheists to design are the attitudes we see in past scientists. Carl Sagan was willing to give even someone as flaky as Velikovsky a hearing; Fred Hoyle, an agnostic or atheist, said that it sure looked as if a superintelligence had monkeyed with nature. But the new breed of popular scientist/commenter on science is a belligerent breed: Krauss, Hawking, Stenger, Dawkins, Coyne, Myers, etc. These men are not true intellectuals or thinkers, because they are not truly open; their minds are made up. They are filled with anger against religion or anything they take to be possibly supportive of religion, and they are very political rather than scholarly in the way they express opposition to their own interpretations of nature. They see themselves as crusading knights against anti-science, but the virtue of a crusading knight -- zeal -- has no place in theoretical disciplines. The true thinker will maintain an open mind on whether or not there is design in the universe or in biological systems, and will put at risk his own atheism and materialism, just as he asks religious people to put at risk their own religion. I don't see that kind of pure scholarly/scientific/philosophical objectivity in 99% of the internet debates on these subjects, or in 95% of the popular books and pronouncements published or issued by scientists on these subjects. I see a personal hatred of the possibility that there might be design in nature, and a determination to smash that conclusion before it is allowed to gain any strength through open discussion in a fear-free university environment. And now I'm done with this thread -- unless rvb8 or the others who ducked out decide to return and account for their positions.Timaeus
February 15, 2015
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People who talk about Gonzalez need to realize that he, not any other astronomer, has given us the exact parameters to look for in order to find other intelligent living organisms. His research shames Drake's and yet no one talks about him as they do Drake.Joe
February 15, 2015
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Timaeus, Like rvb8, I owe you some answers. First, you ask why don't universities limit their faculty to those topics which can be investigated with equipment available at the university.
It would be unwise, therefore, for a university that cannot afford the deluxe, one-of-a-kind electron microscope to start up a graduate and research program in biology which *requires that all of its researchers have constant access to this expensive piece of equipment*. It should start a graduate program which can function quite well with microscopes of lower (but still great) power.
The simple answer here is that the university administration doesn't decide what kind of research is done by its faculty. A new faculty member receives an empty lab space with power outlets, running water, and some startup money from the university. He or she then purchases whatever equipment is necessary to carry out his or her research, raising additional money from federal and private sources in the process. This is how it has been since the end of the nineteenth century, when first research universities appeared in the US. Federal support has not always been available, but professors have always been their own bosses. Some equipment, as I said, is too expensive to be built by individual faculty and even by a university. The time scales can also be fairly long. The Large Hadron Collider took 10 years to build. So agencies or governments pool resources and create a facility to be used by many.
Regarding Columbia and the smog in New York, one solution would be for Columbia not to offer graduate programs in observational astronomy at all, but to restrict itself to theoretical work in astrophysics, based on what the observational astronomers elsewhere discover.
I don't see the point of this limitation. Why can't a professor travel to a telescope? Travel costs are fairly minimal in comparison to the cost of building and maintaining a high-end telescope. Furthermore, if only professors at the University of Arizona had access to its telescopes, there wouldn't be enough people to fill available time slots. It would be an inefficient use of the great resource.
I think our deeper disagreement is over the term “research university.” My conception of university science departments is shaped by universities I know well, and in those universities the situation you describe — where a department has hardly any teaching going on — does not obtain.
You're reading into my words more than there is to them. I don't think I have ever said that there is hardly any teaching at a research university. Every faculty member, with a rare exception (e.g., if you are a sole Nobel laureate in your department), teaches regular lecture courses. The teaching load is lower than it is at liberal arts colleges, but teaching students is a primary responsibility.
I think a university should NOT be an exclusively or even overwhelmingly research institution. I think that research must go on in the university, but a PURE RESEARCH institution is not a university. If a scientist wants to do PURE RESEARCH, and no teaching, he should not be at a UNIVERSITY.
As I said, a research university is not a research-only university. Look at Princeton, Harvard, or MIT. Pretty much every faculty member teaches courses.
The university prof — ALL university profs — should be teacher-researchers and should love both sides of their work, the teaching and the research. Special leaves for research for a year or two can be granted, but the NORMAL life of a tenured faculty member at ANY university should be as teacher-scholar or teacher-scientist.
That's exactly how it is.
I would add that the liberal arts college is the REAL university, and the research-focused institution is an impostor masquerading as a real university.
I don't know where you got this misconception, Timaeus. I thought you were a faculty member someplace. Perhaps I am wrong about that. You seem utterly unfamiliar with the system of higher education in the US.skram
February 15, 2015
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skram: Thanks for your reply, which contains further useful information and reasonable argument (within the unreasonable framework that you are describing). It is hard for me to answer further without detailed knowledge of astronomical equipment; I don't know what sorts of machinery are needed for what sorts of research. What I *do* know is that not *all* scientific research in a field *always* requires the most expensive and rare equipment in the world. For example, for some biological research, biologists may have to travel to some university that has an extremely powerful and expensive electron microscope; but for other biological research, the magnifying power of microscopes that are well within any university's budget may be adequate. It would be unwise, therefore, for a university that cannot afford the deluxe, one-of-a-kind electron microscope to start up a graduate and research program in biology which *requires that all of its researchers have constant access to this expensive piece of equipment*. It should start a graduate program which can function quite well with microscopes of lower (but still great) power. If that means, for example, (and I'm just making this up, not pretending the science is accurate) that it cannot offer a Ph.D. in virology, but can offer one in bacteriology (presuming for the sake of argument that bacteria are bigger and thus visible to less expensive microscopes), well then, so be it: let *another* institution offer the research/grad program in virology; and let the criteria for tenure in the lower-budget school be success in research on bacteria, not on viruses. Don't fire the prof who has not produced enough research on viruses because he doesn't have a microscope good enough to see them, blaming him for not being granted enough "microscope time." Measure him for tenure as a bacteriologist, not a virologist. It seems to me that there must be many areas of astronomy where a university has very good equipment, adequate for purposes X and Y, but not for purpose Z. Fine, then let that university offer Ph.D. programs in areas X and Y, and let the university with the gold-star facilities run the graduate programs in area Z. Division of labor -- a very rational principle regarding social resources. Common sense, no? Regarding Columbia and the smog in New York, one solution would be for Columbia not to offer graduate programs in observational astronomy at all, but to restrict itself to theoretical work in astrophysics, based on what the observational astronomers elsewhere discover. (Remember my earlier example of Einstein.) There would still be research profs in astrophysics at Columbia, but they would be calculating the mass of quasars etc., not observing slight changes of light in a telescope that might indicate a planet passing in front of its sun. Leave such observational research to the profs in states with clearer skies. Again, a common-sense division of labor. I think our deeper disagreement is over the term "research university." My conception of university science departments is shaped by universities I know well, and in those universities the situation you describe -- where a department has hardly any teaching going on -- does not obtain. I am used to universities in which there is major, world-class research going on, BUT it is expected that EVERY professor (except those on special research leaves which have to be applied for and granted) does his or her share of both graduate and undergraduate teaching, plus departmental duties and university and community service. You seem to be describing a university in which very little undergraduate teaching is done, and what is done, is done by only a small handful of teachers, the drudges, with the rest (the self-appointed elite) spending all their time on research. And this is where our philosophical disagreement lies. It lies in our different conception of "university." I think a university should NOT be an exclusively or even overwhelmingly research institution. I think that research must go on in the university, but a PURE RESEARCH institution is not a university. If a scientist wants to do PURE RESEARCH, and no teaching, he should not be at a UNIVERSITY. He should be in the research division of a private corporation, or of the US Army, or at the Rand Corporation (if it still exists), or in some other special research institute (Wistar, NIH, etc.), or at NASA, etc. The university proper is a community of scholars, and inherent in its function is a close relationship of teaching and research, whereby teaching is as important as research. The university prof -- ALL university profs -- should be teacher-researchers and should love both sides of their work, the teaching and the research. Special leaves for research for a year or two can be granted, but the NORMAL life of a tenured faculty member at ANY university should be as teacher-scholar or teacher-scientist. It seems to me all along I have been envisioning ISU as a place like the teaching-research universities I know, and perhaps I have been laboring under a misconception. If so, if the astronomy department at ISU is essentially a research institution where teaching is a very incidental and unimportant part of things, and where most researchers don't teach, then perhaps indeed a good teacher like Gonzalez would be better off somewhere else, teaching science in a liberal arts college or the like. But then I would add that the liberal arts college is the REAL university, and the research-focused institution is an impostor masquerading as a real university. Perhaps ISU should change its name to ISRI (Iowa State Research Institute) to avoid false advertising about what it is and does. I could live with it if Gonzalez was fired from an institution that is not actually a university, but something else. I just want the man to have a university position somewhere; he has more than earned it! As for actual costs, let's see. What is the typical cost of running just *one* Women's Studies department of 20 profs? The average salary will be something like $70,000 a year (midway between starting and final salaries), so the one department is costing 1.4 million a year in professor salaries alone, not counting secretarial help, paper, photocopiers, etc. Over ten years, that is 14 million. Say there are 100 such programs in the USA. That makes 1.4 billion. So that is two Kepler observatories right there, that could be erected after only 10 years of savings. And there are actually many more Women's Studies professors than that. Then, if you factor in all the other special interest programs and departments across the nation, you will save at least as much again as you saved on Women's Studies. Think of all the great scientific equipment we could buy to make more space for researchers! Plus, we would have the side-benefit of clearing the university campus of its intellectual parasites, who are there not to contribute to human knowledge but to change the world in a left-liberal-radical feminist direction. Students would then no longer be able to major in politically correct baloney, but would have to study serious subjects such as history, philosophy, literature, chemistry, math, etc. It would be a win-win for everyone. :-)Timaeus
February 9, 2015
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skram: make a back-of-the-envelope calculation of savings ...
Dean: "Why do I always have to give you physicists so much money for laboratories and expensive equipment and stuff? Why couldn't you be more like the mathematics department - all they need are pencils, paper, and waste-paper baskets. Or even better, like the philosophy department. All they need are pencils and paper."
The Kepler observatory launched to discover exoplanets cost 'only' $600 million.Zachriel
February 9, 2015
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Timaeus:
I don’t say that *every university* should have a state-of-the-art observatory; but it seems to me that every university *that offers doctoral training in astronomy* should have its own telescope facilities that are good enough *for the kind of research that it offers training in*.
Pretty much every major research university offers doctoral training in astronomy, Timaeus. The requirement that Iowa State must have the same type of facilities as U Texas is simply unrealistic: the State of Iowa (population 3 million) simply doesn't have the kind of money the State of Texas (population 27 million) has. Or take private universities like Columbia. It's located in Manhattan, where observing with a telescope is impossible. Should Columbia build its own telescope facility somewhere in Arizona? That isn't happening any time soon. Nonetheless, Columbia has an excellent doctoral program in astronomy, and its faculty are able to secure observation time at telescopes elsewhere in the world.
But what I really want to focus on is the *moral* problem. You ask some bright young high school kid to devote his life to science; he wins a scholarship, does well in undergrad, does well in grad school, wins a post-doc, then gets a tenure-track job in a program in which he is very well-trained. He therefore expects that he will spend his life in the field in which he has undergone long and expensive training. But then you tell him: “Guess what, you don’t actually have a guaranteed job despite your training.
A doctoral program in astronomy gives no promise that every person who comes through it will receive a tenured position at a major research university. If you see one on some departmental website or in a brochure, let me know. In fact, if we were trying to give that kind of guarantee, there would be one, maybe two, graduate student per professor's entire life. On average. With a typical tenure-track position lasting for about 30 years, a professor would have a grad student during 6 to 12 of those years. Why is this not happening? Because people who get trained in physical sciences can be employed not just in academia but well beyond it as well. Looking at my PhD classmates, I see only a few people employed as faculty at major research universities. Some are staff at national research labs. Others teach at liberal arts colleges. Yet others work in industrial research and development. Some crunch data in finance. The unemployment rate for people with a PhD in physical sciences is pretty low.
So why should types such as “astronomy professor” and “physics professor” be the only members of society who get the shaft, neither for lack of ability nor lack of initiative, but due to lack of public resources? It isn’t fair. When you ask someone to give up the best years of his life — from about 18 to about 30 — to train in a highly specialized area, and he does so, and becomes very well trained, you have asked that person to sacrifice years of income he could have earned in another field, or years of time he could have devoted to training in another field, and therefore you have given that person an implicit promise that he will be able to work in that field. Then you go back on the promise, and the guy is 30, and has no marketable skill because he is hyper-specialized. What is he supposed to do then — give up science and go to some community college and take a course on real estate to make a living?
Speaking of Gonzalez, did he end up in real estate? No, he became a faculty at Grover City College, which is by all accounts an upstanding institution of higher education. (I bet you wouldn't mind teaching there.) It does not have a doctoral program, to be sure, but again, no doctoral program in physics and astronomy promises that to its applicants.
By all reports, Gonzalez was a good undergrad teacher. Maybe he could have been “demoted” from the position of big-time lead researcher, and assigned by the Chair to spend 2/3 of his time teaching, and 1/3 of his time either using the more limited observational facilities of ISU or doing theoretical work to back up the observations of his colleagues. He would then still have been useful around the place, and would still have had a job.
Major research universities have very few teaching faculty positions, perhaps one person out of twenty or so. We can split points about whether this is good or bad, but at the moment these opportunities are few and far between. At any rate, Gonzalez is gainfully employed in academia. He was, let me remind you, given a job at Grover City, arguably the best liberal arts institution with a conservative bend. From there he moved to Ball State, a place where he has a chance to get tenure (GCC, ironically, doesn't offer tenure).
If you want my “better idea,” well, let’s take subjects like Women’s Studies, Puerto Rican Studies, Afro-American Studies, Gay Studies, Animal Rights Studies, etc. These subjects are not true academic subjects but are the product of activism by special interest groups, and they waste millions of taxpayers’ dollars every year. I would cut off all funding for these programs and fire all their professors, and take the money saved and use it to buy several universities such as Iowa State their own observatories as good as the one in Texas. Then there would have been enough telescope time at ISU for Gonzalez to discover more extrasolar planets right at home, without having to apply for telescope time at a facility in another State.
Sounds like a plan. See if you can push it through in, say, Louisiana, where Bobby Jindal seems sympathetic to these ideas. Before you run off to the governor with this plan, make a back-of-the-envelope calculation of savings achieved by hacking off said programs and compare the number to the cost of building a decent telescope facility.skram
February 9, 2015
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T, there is a reason why astronomy is one science where amateurs still can make significant albeit niche contributions. Telescope time, as in roll your own. But GG was in the area of searching for tiny wobbles that indicate exo-planets (of which he was a pioneer). That's going to require serious mirror size. And BTW, that issue of access also makes me wonder. KFkairosfocus
February 9, 2015
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skram: I don't say that *every university* should have a state-of-the-art observatory; but it seems to me that every university *that offers doctoral training in astronomy* should have its own telescope facilities that are good enough *for the kind of research that it offers training in*. If there also have to be ultra-specialized observatories elsewhere, which an astronomer from ISU *occasionally* needs to use, then fine; but *most* of Iowa State's astronomical observation should be able to be done in facilities owned by Iowa State. Otherwise, Iowa State has no business running a Ph.D. program to teach research astronomers. What is the point of training in Iowa 30 young astronomers in the use of distant facilities in Texas that only 12 of them will ever be allowed to use? Similarly, if there are only five particle accelerators in all of the United States, there should not be 100 graduate programs in nuclear physics that require the regular use of particle accelerators by the graduate students and researchers, because the grad students and researchers will not be able to get enough access time to the accelerators to learn their science or earn their tenure. And if, e.g., there are only 10 hospital/research labs in the United States that have the facilities for practicing pediatric neurosurgery, there should not be 75 Ph.D. programs in pediatric neurosurgery across the land, where the hopeful surgeons sit twiddling their thumbs, or practicing on plastic dummies of children, because there is no place for them to learn how to operate. But what I really want to focus on is the *moral* problem. You ask some bright young high school kid to devote his life to science; he wins a scholarship, does well in undergrad, does well in grad school, wins a post-doc, then gets a tenure-track job in a program in which he is very well-trained. He therefore expects that he will spend his life in the field in which he has undergone long and expensive training. But then you tell him: "Guess what, you don't actually have a guaranteed job despite your training. You see, in order to keep your job, you have to do X hours of research using facility Y, but there are 100 people who want to use facility Y and only room for 40 of them, so 60 of them are not going to be able to do the research that will enable them to keep their jobs. So though *all* of you will actually be technically qualified to use the facilities, and *all* of you capable of doing good research with the facilities, if only you could get access to them, some of you will be out of luck, and who is out of luck will be based on the partly subjective judgment of committees concerning your research proposals. So you may, after years of training, find yourself unemployed, not because you don't know enough to do your job, but because you can't find a seat in one of the scarce chairs when the music stops." Now, in *any* other position in society, do we do that to trained people? Are policemen hired, and then, after 5 years, told they are going to be let go because they aren't good enough marksmen, though the reason they aren't good enough marksmen is that they were denied access to the police shooting range to practice their marksmanship? Are lawyers hired, who do quite good work in a general law firm, but then, after 5 years, told that they are going to be let go because they don't know enough to defend death penalty cases -- when in fact they were denied access to the library which contains the literature needed to study and master death penalty cases, because there weren't enough chairs in the library? No, we don't do that in *any* walk of life -- spend public money training a person to the level needed to do the job, and then hire the person, and then later tell the person he isn't producing enough -- because we won't give him the resources to produce. So why should types such as "astronomy professor" and "physics professor" be the only members of society who get the shaft, neither for lack of ability nor lack of initiative, but due to lack of public resources? It isn't fair. When you ask someone to give up the best years of his life -- from about 18 to about 30 -- to train in a highly specialized area, and he does so, and becomes very well trained, you have asked that person to sacrifice years of income he could have earned in another field, or years of time he could have devoted to training in another field, and therefore you have given that person an implicit promise that he will be able to work in that field. Then you go back on the promise, and the guy is 30, and has no marketable skill because he is hyper-specialized. What is he supposed to do then -- give up science and go to some community college and take a course on real estate to make a living? Why was he lied to about the number of positions available? Why wasn't he told that no matter how hard he worked and no matter how smart he was, his career survival depended in large measure on the fickle tastes of a committee of science mandarins, i.e., on a crap shoot? There is more that you aren't thinking about. Some people can be very good undergraduate and even graduate teachers without being the biggest research star of their university. Some people can also be very good mathematical scientists without being good observational scientists. E.g., Einstein never had any "telescope time" but he contributed a great deal to the understanding of what the astronomers discovered with their telescopes. Why can there not be a place for those good teachers, and those good theoretical physicist/astronomers who interpret results, even if they themselves aren't making the observations? For example, why couldn't Gonzalez have been given a permanent position on faculty, but given different duties from the professors who were getting all the telescope time? Much of astrophysics is done on the blackboard or the computer, and teaching a class of 100 undergrads, and diligently marking all their papers and helping them in one's office, doesn't require telescope time. Given that there simply is not enough telescope time in all of the USA for all the astronomers who are supposed to be accumulating it, and given that the shortfall is not merely 5% (which might be OK -- that would get rid of only the poor scientists) but more like 100%, then it makes sense to rearrange the teaching and research assignments within astronomy departments so that it is no longer an expectation that *everyone* will have telescope time at major research facilities. And it makes sense to change the requirements for tenure to facilitate that kind of rearrangement. By all reports, Gonzalez was a good undergrad teacher. Maybe he could have been "demoted" from the position of big-time lead researcher, and assigned by the Chair to spend 2/3 of his time teaching, and 1/3 of his time either using the more limited observational facilities of ISU or doing theoretical work to back up the observations of his colleagues. He would then still have been useful around the place, and would still have had a job. Basically the system is set up so that many *have* to fail -- and not just the poor or lazy scientists, but even many of the *good* ones. And that's a stupid system. In a good system, it should be at least theoretically possible that 100% of the faculty earns tenure. But with the ratio of telescopes to Ph.D.s being so low, it is quite possible that only 50% or less of the faculty (nationwide, whatever might be the case at individual schools) can meet the mark. The system is obviously poorly planned. If you want my "better idea," well, let's take subjects like Women's Studies, Puerto Rican Studies, Afro-American Studies, Gay Studies, Animal Rights Studies, etc. These subjects are not true academic subjects but are the product of activism by special interest groups, and they waste millions of taxpayers' dollars every year. I would cut off all funding for these programs and fire all their professors, and take the money saved and use it to buy several universities such as Iowa State their own observatories as good as the one in Texas. Then there would have been enough telescope time at ISU for Gonzalez to discover more extrasolar planets right at home, without having to apply for telescope time at a facility in another State. :-)Timaeus
February 8, 2015
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Timaeus, Like it or not, doing cutting-edge astronomical science involves observations at state-of-the-art facilities. If you look at Gonzalez's earlier papers, written while he was a highly successful postdoc at U Wash, you will see that. Here is an excerpt from one of his most cited papers "Parent Stars of Extrasolar Planets VI: Abundance Analyses of 20 New Systems." A preprint is available here: arXiv:astro-ph/0010197.
High-resolution, high S/N ratio spectra of 14 stars were obtained with the 2dcoude echelle spectrograph at the McDonald observatory 2.7 m telescope using the same setup as described in Paper V.
The McDonald observatory is financed by the State of Texas and is run by U Texas, Austin. Needless to say, outside observers have to apply for observation time. And it simply wouldn't make sense for every university in the US to build and maintain the same type of telescope: that would be a colossal waste of resources. So we have to share them. There are fields of science where experimentalists can build and maintain their own experimental setups. Others have to conduct their experiments at specialized centers such as national labs. For example, Oak Ridge National Lab has a state-of-the-art Spallation Neutron Source, where physicists scatter neutrons off new materials to characterize their structural and magnetic properties. No university can maintain this kind of facility: it's too expensive and specialized. If you have two or three people in the physics department doing neutron scattering, you can't invest a billion bucks into a lab like that. And how should facilities decide which experiments are worth running? They have panels of outside experts who read the submitted proposals and rank them. Do you have a better idea? Let's hear it.skram
February 8, 2015
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skram: Sorry to hear about your administrative troubles. I am not involved in anything related to the running of the site, i.e., I know nothing about connection problems or the moderation of particular individuals. I have not yet consulted the particular web site you mentioned, but I found about 10 other sites specifically dedicated to the issues around telescope time (not in relation to the Gonzalez case, but about telescope time as a problem for researchers generally). What a political and administrative nightmare! It seems as if too many astronomers are chasing after far too few telescopes, and the very crude way the astrophysics/astronomy community has developed to deal with this is to set them all at each other's throats, competing for scarce resources in the manner described by Thomas Malthus. So they all have to write up pleas for telescope time, which are then reviewed by supposedly independent evaluators -- i.e., some other individual or committee is supposed to tell the scientific community whether or not your research proposal is important enough that you deserve time at the telescope. If the reviewers you happen to get, by luck of the draw, like your project, you will get the time; if they don't, you won't. And there is plenty of room for subjectivity in determining what is or is not a worthy project. As one astronomer/physicist put it one site (a site that had nothing to do with the Gonzalez case or ID, by the way), it is sometimes the harsh fact of research life that a young scientist can be "royally screwed" by the prejudice or personal malice of others, and have his career unjustly stopped, in a system that works this way. Of course these problems are not unique to telescope-related science; they are part of much of modern grant-based science generally. There are other areas of theoretical physics where almost all grant money in the USA is assigned based on the decisions of a single office or organization; if that office or organization takes a dislike to the kind of projects you propose, your research career is finished. That's a bad situation; you want a situation where funding sources are controlled by many different groups, so that no one philosophy or ideology or bias can control an entire academic field. This is the problem with "big science" -- it's too tied in to money. That's not what university life should be about. A system needs to be devised where (a) all *bright* people can get a Ph.D. and get access to all needed research tools, without clawing the way to the top over the dead bodies of their research brethren, and (b) all not-so-bright people don't even get Ph.D.s in the first place. There is no point in a society graduating 1,000 brain surgeons a year if there are only operating theaters enough for 500, and there is no point in graduating 1,000 telescope-needing researchers a year if there are only telescopes enough for 500. The system is stupid. This sort of thing doesn't happen in most Arts subjects because in most Arts subjects all you need for your research is the library, plus interlibrary loans. A professor of history isn't fired for "failing to be granted enough library time." He might be fired for never *using* the library -- and hence never publishing enough articles based on his reading in the library -- but he would never be fired because some gatekeeper wouldn't let him in the library long enough to do his work. The Arts system is therefore more rational than the cutthroat, dog-eat-dog, Malthusian science system. (Of course, there are exceptions: fields like sociology and education theory have billions in research money tossed at them by governments, so similar deformities of true academic life can happen even in the Arts. But your average professor of Roman poetry or of medieval military history or of Enlightenment philosophy isn't the beneficiary of these gravy trains.) What scientists should be working toward is a research environment that is not a zero-sum game, where every talented person has use of the facilities for the asking, so that he doesn't have to waste his intellect learning the arts of grantsmanship, when he should be expending his brain cells upon the subject-matter of his research field. One practical solution might be regulations that prevent universities from offering Ph.D. or research programs in astronomy/astrophysics unless they own and control their own telescope facilities and can prove to a government agency that their facilities are adequate to give all their faculty members sufficient observation time. It would be better to spend money on more telescopes than on the salaries of hundreds of professors across the nation, running around writing up research grant proposals, and evaluating the grant proposals of others. If the taxpayer is going to be millions of dollars poorer, it should be for the sake of more telescopes, not more applications, reports, committee meetings, etc. which don't add an iota to human knowledge, but merely determine who gets to use the existing telescopes. Committees, reports, evaluations, and the creation of a pecking order for research money add nothing to real social wealth.Timaeus
February 8, 2015
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Timaeus: I figured out that my home IP address is blocked by UD editors. I might use my university VPN to circumvent that as I am doing now. Some academic freedom here!skram
February 8, 2015
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http://lmgtfy.com/?q=applying+for+telescope+timeskram
February 6, 2015
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I'm going to raise one more point that has not yet been covered. It is a point to which I have never been given a clear and direct answer, and which no doubt confuses the general public when they read about the Gonzalez case. The public reads that Gonzalez "had not been granted" enough telescope time, and that this was held against him by the tenure review committee and by the President. Now, from a simple grammatical point of view, "not having been granted" something is not something one could ever be fairly penalized for, because the passive construction implies that *someone else* had the keys to something, and *withheld* the means of access to the other party. So the blame must logically go to the person doing the withholding, not the person from whom the thing was withheld. The basic rules of grammar, plus basic semantics, yield this conclusion. So either the complaint about telescope time is completely unfounded, i.e., Gonzalez was faulted for the actions of some ornery gatekeeper (maybe one who didn't like him for his ID views), or something is being left out of the explanation. I am going to be intellectually generous here, and supply what the pro-ISU side, in its incompetence in using the English language, has failed to supply; I do this out of a sense of fair play, in order to make sense of its position even though it is poorly expressed. I am going to make a guess how a literate, competent user of English might have written up the complaint against Gonzalez re telescope time. I think the meaning is probably: "Gonzalez did not do much research [scientists: notice the proper active voice of the verb "do"] using the telescope, as he should have, and it is for this reason that we are punishing him; but actually it is more complicated than that, because it is not as if he didn't want, or didn't try, to walk into the room where the telescope was, and use it; rather, in order to use the telescope, a scientist is expected first to stop being a scientist for a while, and become a pitch-man and fundraiser, and beg with hat in hand for money to offset the cost of using the telescope; and only after he has succeeded as a science huckster will the authorities guarding the facilities allow him actual access to the telescope, so he can perform the function which he was hired and paid a professor's salary to perform." Now, I may have mischaracterized the situation, but if so, it's the fault of the anti-Gonzalez forces, because they haven't explained how "getting telescope time" works, and have left me and everyone else guessing exactly how Gonzalez was at fault. They have written in a sort of in-house shorthand that only specialist astronomy researchers will understand. So I invite them to correct my above effort, if it's wrong, and explain, in better words, in plain English that an intelligent citizen can grasp, exactly how Gonzalez was supposed to acquire "telescope time" and exactly what he failed to do in order to acquire it, and exactly why he was blameworthy for not doing so. Some observations: I assume that ISU would not be offering a graduate program in physics/astronomy unless it owned physical facilities for research in that field. I therefore infer that ISU owned one or more telescopes capable of gathering data relevant to extrasolar planets and such things. I also infer that ISU would not have hired Gonzalez unless it wanted him to be sitting in front of its telescopes, taking measurements of this and that. I would therefore make the logical inference that when ISU budgeted for Gonzalez's position before he was hired, it did a rough calculation of how much telescope time it had available for the total of its professors, and knew roughly how much telescope time each of its professors would need, and determined that there would be enough time for Gonzalez to have his share in the use of the facilities. So to me it is puzzling that, having been hired to use the telescopes, Gonzalez would then have to make a special appeal to actually get to use them, as if the Administration was doing him a big favor by granting him access. That would be like a hospital hiring a surgeon, and then acting as if it was doing the surgeon a big favor by granting him access to the operating room to save the dying emergency patient, or like a fire department hiring a fireman, but requiring the fireman to go around the community asking citizens for contributions to the fire engine before he was allowed to ride in it to put out any fires. It's not the job of surgeons or firemen to raise the money needed for the equipment they use in their jobs. Fundraising is the job of the institution that hires them. ISU should never have hired an astronomer in the first place unless with that hiring came a promise of some minimum amount of no-hassle access time to the telescope, any more than a university should hire a particle physicist specifically to smash atoms, without a promise to that physicist that he will have at least a guaranteed minimum of hours annually of access to the atom-smasher. So from the average citizen's point of view, all this business about not being granted access to the telescope makes no sense at all. Why is it such a bloody difficult thing to get access to the institution's telescope when the institution hired you and paid you a fat salary precisely to use that telescope? Was ISU telescope-poor? Did it have only one telescope that was overbooked? If so, how did it expect Gonzalez to function? Or was he supposed to *compete* for limited telescope time, against *other* ISU astronomers? In that case, if there was only a finite total amount of telescope time, and more desire for the telescope than could be handled, then ISU would be running a zero-sum game, in which *some* of its astronomers would by mathematical necessity would be out of luck. So *some* astronomer (if not Gonzalez then another) would be blamed by the administration for "not being granted enough telescope time." But what a stupid administration that would be, that sets up its astronomy department so that some professor has to be blamed for not using the telescope enough! Why not simply make sure it has *exactly enough telescopes for all the faculty that it hires*, so they don't have to compete with each other for the resources? That would be the common-sense way of proceeding, in *any* organization, private or public. Are the Ph.D.s in the natural sciences who run ISU's research programs unable to handle this simple administrative reasoning? (If so, it wouldn't be the first time that science Ph.D.s showed lack of basic human intelligence outside of their narrow specialized scientific fields.) Perhaps our vaunted science experts here can explain this incoherent situation to the lay public, in non-jargon terms. I don't intend to argue further about Gonzalez here; I'm merely trying to understand further one aspect of the case. All I want is a straight answer about the administrative procedures I've asked about. And I would ask that no one answer me who does not have first-hand knowledge of telescope time in university research settings, unless that person has directly spoken with people in the field and asked about this particular point. I don't want more internet armchair speculation about how things probably worked at ISU. I want facts. If I get a satisfactory reply, I will say no more. If I get the usual obfuscation and excuse-making, I might speak one more time.Timaeus
February 6, 2015
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kf
is that the subtext was that his potential was viewed as a threat rather than an asset; so, powerful resources were called on to construct him in the worst possible light and damage his career and undermine the credibility of his work and views.
Gonzalez was the one who brought into question his ability to be his own boss, his ability to develop and run his own lab, his ability to mentor students, his ability to secure funding for his students and what should have been (after a seven year trial period) a fruitful line of original research. You need to come to grips with the simple fact that while Gonzalez was under the mentorship of his graduate student mentor and his postdoc mentors he performed admirab;y but when set out on his own he could not handle the situation as a successful tenure candidate would. Not everyone has the aptitude to be in a position to run a lab and manage the personnel and resources required to run a successful lab. Hopefully, he will have learned that lesson and improve his performance and his new place of employment.franklin
February 6, 2015
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PS: Today's evolutionary materialists and fellow travellers are often quick to dismiss or angrily pounce on concerns about inherent amorality, but the above points T has put on the table about the climate in institutions dominated by that sort of atheism bring to mind the force of Plato's warning in The Laws, Bk X. So, FTR also, let me again put the matter on the table:
Ath. . . .[The avant garde philosophers and poets, c. 360 BC] say that fire and water, and earth and air [i.e the classical "material" elements of the cosmos], all exist by nature and chance, and none of them by art . . . [such that] all that is in the heaven, as well as animals and all plants, and all the seasons come from these elements, not by the action of mind, as they say, or of any God, or from art, but as I was saying, by nature and chance only [ --> that is, evolutionary materialism is ancient and would trace all things to blind chance and mechanical necessity] . . . . [Thus, they hold] that the principles of justice have no existence at all in nature, but that mankind are always disputing about them and altering them; and that the alterations which are made by art and by law have no basis in nature, but are of authority for the moment and at the time at which they are made.- [ --> Relativism, too, is not new; complete with its radical amorality rooted in a worldview that has no foundational IS that can ground OUGHT.] These, my friends, are the sayings of wise men, poets and prose writers, which find a way into the minds of youth. They are told by them that the highest right is might [ --> Evolutionary materialism -- having no IS that can properly ground OUGHT -- leads to the promotion of amorality on which the only basis for "OUGHT" is seen to be might (and manipulation: might in "spin")], and in this way the young fall into impieties, under the idea that the Gods are not such as the law bids them imagine; and hence arise factions [ --> Evolutionary materialism-motivated amorality "naturally" leads to continual contentions and power struggles influenced by that amorality], these philosophers inviting them to lead a true life according to nature, that is, to live in real dominion over others [ --> such amoral factions, if they gain power, "naturally" tend towards ruthless abuse], and not in legal subjection to them.
kairosfocus
February 6, 2015
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Folks, FTR, just remember in evaluating all of this, that you are here dealing with an exo-planets pioneer with obvious high career potential as a researcher AND teacher (note the textbook published while at ISU), with dozens of papers to back it up. And, someone who brings ethnic diversity to the table, as a Cuban. A very reasonable concern, under the circumstances of a climate of hostility and linked agitation, is that the subtext was that his potential was viewed as a threat rather than an asset; so, powerful resources were called on to construct him in the worst possible light and damage his career and undermine the credibility of his work and views. In that light the attitude evident above and elsewhere does very little to alleviate such concerns, but instead just the opposite. KFkairosfocus
February 6, 2015
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Timaeus
This is incredibly fatuous. If he had *a whole year* of sabbatical, what would stop him from doing the research and writing it up all in the same year?
What funding source was he going to use to conduct this research while on sabbatical? He was unable to solicit any funding for telescope time ( a quite necessary requirement for someone in his position) so what makes you think this would change? Timaeus
I knew all kinds of nuclear physicists. They were constantly using the accelerator for their particle research. In many cases they could do all the *physical* experimentation necessary to determine a particular nucleonic structure in a few weeks, or even a few days; then they could go off and do the math and the write-up. They might easily investigate the inner structure of several different nuclides, and publish an article on each, within the space of a one-year sabbatical. It is because you make statements like this that I infer you don’t actually know very much about scientific research.
Too bad Gonzalez didn't try the same approach (experiments and data collection) while he was on his probationary period at ISU. timaeus
I see that you still lack the courage to directly answer my question: do you or do you not acknowledge that there were people at ISU who would have preferred not to have Gonzalez as a colleague because they were repelled by his endorsement of ID?
This coming from someone who dodged all of my questions posed to use is nothing but laughable. I have no doubt there were may have been people who did not like Gonzalez for his ID views or any other personality conflict he had with others. having rejected his committees suggestion that Gonzalez bot include his book in his merit review I can easily imagine that members might see this as a bit of hubris on his part and view it negatively. Timaeus
t is because you make statements like this that I infer you don’t actually know very much about scientific research.
you should really try to refrain from characterizing my life experience when you know nothing about me. It does make me chuckel when you make yourself out the fool with your 'speculatioons' Like you, and skram, I also hold Ph.D. and have spent years working in academia and still conducting research after all these years....imagine that Timaeus is wrong once again. timaeus
.I am asking you only whether or not some of his judges started out with a prejudice against him, based on his views. The fact that you keep dodging this question renders your motivation in this discussion highly suspect. You give all the impression of someone who wants to sweep the facts about established motivations under the carpet.
I have no idea if any of his judges (I suppose you mean committee members) were predisposed to be against him but given the admonishments and constructive criticisms they appear to have provided to guide him through the tenure process successfully and him ignoring them I can't imagine that would have made any allies. For someone who claims to have spent countless hours researching this issue and your blatant failure to answer the questions posed to you on this issue makes me think you are someone who wants to sweep the evidence of his accomplishments (while he was at ISU) under the carpet. What did you say that was before? Oh, that would be intellectual dishonesty on your part. Timaeus
Haven’t we beaten this to death now? You three aren’t going to budge an inch, aren’t going to discuss the issue of prior prejudice at all; and it’s that issue that I have been trying to discuss. So if you don’t want to have that conversation, stop replying to me and let this go.
are you now going to 'budge' and acknowledge his failure on many fronts required to meet tenure requirements at ISU? Or is this just a case of your prior prejudice that doesn't permit you to broach these issues we have been speaking about?franklin
February 5, 2015
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franklin: You wrote: "What would he be writing up? He did not conduct any original research while at ISU so what would/could there be to write up?" This is incredibly fatuous. If he had *a whole year* of sabbatical, what would stop him from doing the research and writing it up all in the same year? I knew all kinds of nuclear physicists. They were constantly using the accelerator for their particle research. In many cases they could do all the *physical* experimentation necessary to determine a particular nucleonic structure in a few weeks, or even a few days; then they could go off and do the math and the write-up. They might easily investigate the inner structure of several different nuclides, and publish an article on each, within the space of a one-year sabbatical. It is because you make statements like this that I infer you don't actually know very much about scientific research. I see that you still lack the courage to directly answer my question: do you or do you not acknowledge that there were people at ISU who would have preferred not to have Gonzalez as a colleague because they were repelled by his endorsement of ID? And do you or do you not acknowledge that someone who felt that way might be inclined to interpret Gonzalez' application in the least charitable way? I am *not* asking you -- I have made that clear -- to agree that Gonzalez was the victim of injustice or to say that the tenure verdict was not fair; I am asking you only whether or not some of his judges started out with a prejudice against him, based on his views. The fact that you keep dodging this question renders your motivation in this discussion highly suspect. You give all the impression of someone who wants to sweep the facts about established motivations under the carpet. In this, you are less fair than some of your atheist colleagues. I remember reading one assessment of the case, in which an anti-ID person concluded as follows: the Discovery Institute interpretation of the case was far too one-sided, but there *was* evidence of some discrimination at ISU against Gonzalez for his ID views (though probably that discrimination was not the decisive factor in the tenure denial). This is the sort of nuanced view one rarely hears from atheists. I have not heard such a nuanced view from you, or skram, or Aurelio. All I hear from you is that it was a completely open and shut case, Gonzalez was nowhere close to the standard, and there is nothing to debate or discuss. But not even all of your atheist brethren would say that, let alone organizations like the ASA (many of whose members and executive oppose ID) which were concerned enough about the case to write to ISU about it. I therefore continue to accuse you guys of partisanship. I've not said that your conclusion is wrong, but you've not convinced me that you have any balanced perception of the situation, as you focus entirely on narrow bean-counting questions and pretend the culture war did not exist on the ISU campus at the time and that professors did not have leanings toward one side or the other in the culture war. Haven't we beaten this to death now? You three aren't going to budge an inch, aren't going to discuss the issue of prior prejudice at all; and it's that issue that I have been trying to discuss. So if you don't want to have that conversation, stop replying to me and let this go.Timaeus
February 5, 2015
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skram: I did not say there was a mechanical rule of 15 publications. The number 15 I pulled up, back when I was researching the case, from ISU statements about the case. One of the documents discussing the Gonzalez case -- I can't remember which -- said that, as a rough and ready figure, 15 (or maybe it was 16) publications during the probationary was the minimum that ISU (at least in astronomy) would count as adequate. Having conveyed that figure -- not as a rigid rule, but as "more like what ye might call a guideline" (as a certain ghostly pirate put it), the document did *not* then go on to say "and Gonzalez failed to meet that guideline" -- which it could easily have done if the issue was that Gonzalez did not have enough publications. The feeling I was left with was that the raw number of Gonzalez's publications was not the major objection to his tenure bid, that things related to grantmanship were much more important. You asked for my background. Like you, I hold a Ph.D. I have not served specifically on a tenure committee, but I have served on search and hiring committees and am quite familiar with the intra-departmental politics surrounding hiring, tenure and promotions in modern universities. It is good to know that you have some background in university life, and are not just mouthing off, like so many internet atheists who reflexively decided to defend ISU without any university experience themselves, mainly because they hate ID and reflexively attack anyone associated with ID (as they reflexively negatively review ID books on Amazon, in quite a number of cases without having read them and sometimes proudly admitting they haven't read them). I thank you for your clarifying information. You say you had discussions with some of the people at ISU about the case. Interesting. Were your discussions limited to the purely technical matters, e.g., whether the criteria were being correctly applied, or did they touch on other matters, e.g, on what your friends though about ID and what they thought about Gonzalez for endorsing ID? And did your informants discuss the virulent anti-Gonzalez activity of atheist religious studies professor (you heard that right, atheist religious studies professor) Hector Avalos and the active informal lobby on campus to have Gonzalez sacked? If I knew professors on the inside at ISU, those are things I would have asked them about, as much as the merely formal requirements and procedures. But you seem curiously uninterested in the subjective and human aspects of the case. Of course, the Gonzalez case is only the tip of the iceberg, and I don't really need it to justify my more general position. I personally know scores of ID folks who have been actively discriminated against, and often their careers are destroyed, immorally and treacherously but perfectly legally because there is no paper trail, long before even the first tenure-track job is obtained. I know of a case where a first-class microbiologist, trained at very big schools and with research publications, has been blocked from ever getting a teaching job in the life sciences anywhere in the USA, via the informal "grapevine" -- simply for being *accused* -- the accusations were never substantiated -- of teaching "creationism" in a biology class. (Actually it was not creationism, nor even ID, but merely some very limited criticism, based on peer-reviewed secular scientific literature right in the professor's field, of aspects of neo-Darwinian theory.) If you don't have tenure, you can be done in long before you will have the legal opportunities afforded to Gonzalez by the formalities of tenure review. All it takes is for the rumor mill to accuse you of ID sympathies, and your career is finished. Your applications for post-doctoral funding and tenure-track jobs will be turned down, with all appropriate sweetness ("We are sorry; we are sure you an excellent scientist and teacher, but there were so *many* superb candidates this year ..."), and you will never be able to prove that an unsolicited long-distance phone call from an enemy at your school to someone at the school you are applying to was what did you in. And that's if there is only *suspicion* of your ID sympathies. If you have actively supported ID by writing an article or book or editorial with your real name signed to it, you can kiss your scientific career goodbye, no matter how well you perform by objective standards. But there is no corresponding fear for people on the atheist side. There is no danger at all that any untenured physicist, biologist, etc. who openly expressed views such as those of Larry Krauss or Stephen Hawking or Jerry Coyne, would ever lose a job or a career for expressing those views. The playing field is grossly uneven, and every honest person knows it. So even if there was no injustice in the Gonzalez case, there is clearly a determination, a will to keep ID-sympathetic people out of the universities by any means, even when their teaching and research records would be adequate to warrant permanent employment. The atheists and materialists don't want to share their labs and departments with ID-sympathizers, and they will take whatever actions necessary to keep ID folks out. And there is usually enough wiggle-room in job descriptions, tenure reviews, etc., for people to exercise personal judgment where their prejudices can creep in. I have seen atheists and secular humanists act to keep politically, religiously, or culturally conservative philosophers and scholars -- whose publications and teaching experience equal or exceed those of the actually successful candidates -- out of jobs in various university Arts departments. I do not merely suspect that it happens, I know that it happens, and happens often. I have no reason to believe that atheists and materialists in biology or physics departments are any more intrinsically virtuous or a-political than those in Arts departments. So even if I give you Gonzalez, I don't believe for a moment that there is no active prejudice in science faculties against ID people and I am certain that there have been cases of career termination for the sin of endorsing ID (and I'm speaking of ID, not creationism). This is why most ID people, including myself (though my career vulnerabilities are in areas other than biology or astronomy), have to use pseudonyms on the internet and keep their ID sympathies private in real life, until such time as they get tenure. They are forced to be dishonest and guarded in a way that a young Jerry Coyne or Richard Dawkins or Larry Krauss or P.Z. Myers does not have to be, to make sure that their private philosophical/religious conclusions regarding the implications of science do not destroy their hopes of whatever careers they seek. This is a morally and professionally wrong situation, that young scholars and scientists should have to self-censor in this way, and I will continue to speak up against it, shaming militant atheist Ph.D.s in the natural sciences, wherever I find them, for letting their personal philosophical/religious prejudices improperly influence their professional conduct.Timaeus
February 5, 2015
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Timaeus, I have to agree with skram that your twisting on the issues and grand pronouncements are pretty amusing. Timaeus
My remarks about his book being held against him were not speculation, but documented fact. But in your atheist world, facts don’t matter; the only thing that matters is that anyone who supports ID should be stopped, by hook or by crook, from ever being admitted to a doctoral program, or, if that cannot be prevented, from ever graduating, or, if that cannot be prevented, from ever getting a tenure-track job, or, if that cannot be prevented, from ever getting tenure.
That is quite a bit of whine there, Timaeus. However, the facts are that Gonzalez insisted that his book be included as part of his merit review and as such he opened the door to any and all scrutiny that followed. One of the questions posed to you (that you simply ignored) was 'do you think that was a wise decision on his part?' Timaeus
By the way, your remark “you are not going to succeed in academia if …” is full of chutzpah (since you yourself appear to have had no success in any branch of academia and therefore appear unable to speak from real-life experience), and, as a generalization, wrong.
This ^ is so sad on so many fronts, Timaeus. For example how would you know if I have or have not succeeded in academia (or any other endeavor for that matter) given that you know absolutely nothing about me or my life? Simply empty rhetoric on your part since you appear incapable of responding to the questions posed to you about Gonzalez's time at ISU....even after your appeal to authority that you have spent hours and hours researching this issue. Timaeus
At most it is true of certain natural and engineering sciences which are corruptly tied in with the military-industrial-government research complex. It certainly is not true of the “Arts” subjects. You can do all kinds of productive research in the Arts subjects without having to secure outside grants. All you need is a good library and a good brain.
Huh? How is this related to Gonzalez's failure to generate any significant funding to run his lab and conduct original research? Telescope time cost money and without funding you don't get to play with the tools of the trade, i.e., telescopes. Timaeus
The idea that hiring and tenure decisions are made purely with a view to merit, that there is no politics in them, is incredibly naive, in any walk of life, and in the university world most of all.
In the Gonzalez decision there is no need to invoke politics since his sum of his merit review was so substandard. No need to look beyond his failure to deliver the goods while he was at ISU. Timaeus
the principle that only the publications produced at Iowa State would give indication of future scholarly promise. Why would *all* of the candidate’s publications not give indication of future scholarly promise?
The tenure track position, typically, represents the first time the candidate is placed in charge of establishing a new lab and a line of original research. His past is what got him (and any tenure candidate) a shot at demonstrating what he is capable of accomplishing on his own. He failed. Timaeus
If he could produce great stuff before, is there any reason to doubt that he could produce it again? It’s not as if he was a doddering old septuagenarian, absent-mindedly coasting to retirement; he was still young and sharp.
seven years of little to no productivity in original research and establishment of his own lab replete with grad students and postdocs is a pretty good indicator that he was not up to the task and thus not deserving of tenure. One of his published papers is, as I recall, a review article more suited to the 'doddering old septuagenarian' than someone who is supposed to be demonstrating his ability to establish a line of original research. Timaeus
It is therefore to be *expected* that research output would drop during the years the G. was a faculty member; and he *still* produced a good number of articles during that time, *plus*, I am told, an undergraduate astronomy textbook which is regarded as rather good.
I don't know of any institute that would consider a drop to zero as being acceptable level. The articles produced were principally from pre-ISU research and with authorship with other peoples grad students rather than his own. Timaeus
Gonzalez, without tenure, had not yet had his first sabbatical. How can you say that he would not have produced 5 or 6 peer-reviewed articles in the year of his first sabbatical?
What would he be writing up? He did not conduct any original research while at ISU so what would/could there be to write up? Timaeus
Greater, perhaps, than any injustice by Iowa State is the injustice of you and franklin, who don’t even want to acknowledge the existence of a prejudice against Gonzalez, and are unwilling to concede that it could have influenced judgments.
there was no injustice from ISU in regards to Gonzalez. He failed at getting tenure by his own hand and not doing pretty much everything expected of a tenure candidate. His inclusion of his book in his merit review opened his views on ID up for scrutiny so you should stop your whining about that issue it makes you look foolish.franklin
February 5, 2015
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Timaeus:
You are both writing with extreme naivete about both human nature and professors in particular, as if on tenure reviews all the people involved are completely fair robots, simply toting up numbers according to formulae, and awarding tenure or denying it in accord with strictly objective rules, without any personal judgment involved. I know for a fact that university professors are not like this, that they can be extremely biased and that they very often let personal judgments influence their decisions in such matters.
You crack me up with your grand pronouncements about life in academia for us peasants. Just to let you know: I am a physicist with a permanent position at a major research university. I am well aware of the nature of tenure proceedings in the field of astronomy. I also know people in the physics and astronomy department of Iowa State and I had discussions with them about the case. What are your credentials, again? Much of what you say about the matter is laughable, including the reference to 15 publications that supposedly guarantee tenure at ISU. There is no such thing at any science department of a major research university (which ISU certainly is). You can publish 15 papers at a random paper mill in one year, but that won't impress anyone. So forget this silliness and never repeat it again.
Geoffroy does not say what it is about the refereed publications that concerned him. For example, he does not comment that the number was not enough, or that the quality was not good enough. All he says is that he considered them as a factor. So *your* earlier specific judgments about the contents and quality of those papers have not been confirmed as *Geoffroy’s* specific judgments; nor have you shown that *your* specific judgments were in the minds of those on the actual tenure committee. How do you know that any of these individuals were thinking about the contents and quality of those papers what you think — unless you yourself with in the room with them, speaking with them about the refereed papers?
There is no formula for the number of publications. A candidate for tenure is evaluated not just on publications, not just on grants, and not just on the number of students, but as ISU president wrote, "most importantly, [on] the overall evidence of future career promise in the field of astronomy." All these specific factors are used merely as means to gauge the potential of the person as a leader in his or her field. Not mentioned in the president's statement, but hugely important, are outside letters of evaluation solicited by the department, and later by the university, from recognized people in the scientific field. Looking at Gonzalez's overall record, I can see that he excelled in none of the criteria mentioned. I have already covered his publication record: almost half of the papers were remnants from the pre-ISU times, some of the new papers were conference proceedings. One can look at the impact of these papers as well, and it has not been significant, as measured by the number of citations in the literature. No external funding, no evidence of students graduating or even under supervision. The guy was a spectacular postdoc, and that's why he got a tenure-track position at a major research university. But you can't coast on your postdoc results forever. He needed to prove that he could strike it on his own and to lead his own group—postdocs and students. He failed to do that.skram
February 5, 2015
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skram: Thank you for the clarification regarding numbers of papers published. This tells me that I remembered the count correctly, but provides more accurate information regarding the distribution of the papers over time. I grant you the statement from Geoffroy. That was more or less what I remembered from my earlier study of the case. I don't put the same emphasis on the refereed publications part that you do -- Geoffroy does not say what it is about the refereed publications that concerned him. For example, he does not comment that the number was not enough, or that the quality was not good enough. All he says is that he considered them as a factor. So *your* earlier specific judgments about the contents and quality of those papers have not been confirmed as *Geoffroy's* specific judgments; nor have you shown that *your* specific judgments were in the minds of those on the actual tenure committee. How do you know that any of these individuals were thinking about the contents and quality of those papers what you think -- unless you yourself with in the room with them, speaking with them about the refereed papers? And do you have any statements from anyone involved that the 8 papers which you have excluded from your 18-count were regarded *by them* as not to be counted as evidence of research promise? Or are you simply indicating that *you* would not have counted them as such, had you been on the committee, since they were finished rather than begun at ISU? Second, I object to one of the principles employed by Geoffroy (and by you) -- the principle that only the publications produced at Iowa State would give indication of future scholarly promise. Why would *all* of the candidate's publications not give indication of future scholarly promise? If he was brilliant before he came to IS, is it reasonable to think that he suddenly became less brilliant upon arrival at Iowa State? If he could produce great stuff before, is there any reason to doubt that he could produce it again? It's not as if he was a doddering old septuagenarian, absent-mindedly coasting to retirement; he was still young and sharp. Third, it is ridiculous to penalize a brilliant researcher when his number of publications drops upon taking up a teaching position. A post-doc has time to do *nothing but* research; it is to be expected, then, that during one's post-doc years one will produce much research; once one gets a faculty position, one's time is divided between research and teaching and administrative duties, and the latter two can easily take up half of one's working time or more (except for summertime). It is therefore to be *expected* that research output would drop during the years the G. was a faculty member; and he *still* produced a good number of articles during that time, *plus*, I am told, an undergraduate astronomy textbook which is regarded as rather good. A good astronomy textbook is of service to the astronomy education community in general, it is not fooling around wasting time to produce one. It should be remembered, too, that faculty members, once tenured, get sabbaticals off from teaching for research. Gonzalez, without tenure, had not yet had his first sabbatical. How can you say that he would not have produced 5 or 6 peer-reviewed articles in the year of his first sabbatical? His past history indicated that, when freed up from teaching and administrative concerns, he was capable of that kind of output. Why would one doubt that he could do so again? But as I've already conceded to franklin, it *may be* that Gonzalez would have fallen short of tenure even had there been no personal prejudice against his ID views. The point is that there *was* personal prejudice against him at ISU for those views, and that such prejudice probably did affect the deliberations of the tenure committee -- as one member has confessed at least in his own case. This does not prove that the tenure denial was a miscarriage of justice. I never insisted that it was, but only pointed out that the tenure denial took place in a poisonous atmosphere which leaves room for doubt about the motives of all the participants. Greater, perhaps, than any injustice by Iowa State is the injustice of you and franklin, who don't even want to acknowledge the existence of a prejudice against Gonzalez, and are unwilling to concede that it could have influenced judgments. I haven't asked you concede that the prejudice was decisive, but only to acknowledge that it was clearly present. Since you won't acknowledge this, you are being intellectually unbalanced in your assessment of the case. You are both writing with extreme naivete about both human nature and professors in particular, as if on tenure reviews all the people involved are completely fair robots, simply toting up numbers according to formulae, and awarding tenure or denying it in accord with strictly objective rules, without any personal judgment involved. I know for a fact that university professors are not like this, that they can be extremely biased and that they very often let personal judgments influence their decisions in such matters. It is your pretense that no personal judgments had any influence at all that aggravates me; it tells me either that you don't know the score regarding these institutions, or that you do know the score, but aren't willing to 'fess up about it. In the latter case, you are being intellectually dishonest not to concede the point I'm making. See my summary statement to franklin above. I'm done talking to both of you about this. Since you are not willing to budge from your very narrow, bean-counting perspective, which I consider sociologically and politically naive, and since you have no interest in discussing the full, broad, human and institutional context of this decision and others like it (which have affected the lives and careers of ID supporters, and other academic dissidents, in many more cases than this), there is nothing more that we can usefully converse about.Timaeus
February 5, 2015
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Timaeus:
No one at IS used, as an argument against Gonzalez, that he had not published enough peer-reviewed work; or if they did, that charge did not find its way into the President’s final public statement of the reasons for tenure denial. The President’s main excuses for the denial were that Gonzalez had not brought in enough research grants, and that he “had been denied” much telescope time. The second reason makes no sense at all; if he had been denied telescope time, that is not his fault, but the fault of the people who wouldn’t let him use the observatory. To deny a man tenure because he didn’t use the facilities in a room he was locked out of makes no sense at all. So basically, the only legitimate *formal* reason was that he didn’t bring in enough research bucks. But it doesn’t follow that this formal reason was the real reason; and in no university that is seriously committed to the life of the mind and of truth-seeking should “research bucks” be such an overwhelming criterion that it justifies setting all other considerations (academic competence, teaching ability, etc.) aside.,
This is factually wrong. Here is the statement from Iowa State University President Gregory Geoffroy. It mentions the criteria used in tenure decisions and publication record is explicitly among them.
As part of this decision process, I appointed a member of my staff to conduct a careful and exhaustive review of the appeal request and the full tenure dossier, and that analysis was presented to me. In addition, I conducted my own examination of Dr. Gonzalez's appeal with respect to the evidence of research and scholarship. I independently concluded that he simply did not show the trajectory of excellence that we expect in a candidate seeking tenure in physics and astronomy -- one of our strongest academic programs. Because the issue of tenure is a personnel matter, I am not able to share the detailed rationale for the decision, although that has been provided to Dr. Gonzalez. But I can outline the areas of focus of my review where I gave special attention to his overall record of scientific accomplishment while an assistant professor at Iowa State, since that gives the best indication of future achievement. I specifically considered refereed publications, his level of success in attracting research funding and grants, the amount of telescope observing time he had been granted, the number of graduate students he had supervised, and most importantly, the overall evidence of future career promise in the field of astronomy.
(Emphasis mine.)skram
February 5, 2015
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Timaeus:
Good of you to spend 15 minutes on a quick lookup of a very partial set of relevant considerations, and pit that against hours and hours of study I did on every aspect of the case at the time it was happening. Your data is partly wrong. It was agreed by all that Gonzalez had published 64 or 68 peer-reviewed papers since graduating, and more than 15 of those papers during the tenure-review period. (15 was considered the minimum acceptable by ISU, and Gonzalez met it with some to spare.) So your search somehow missed something. Perhaps you don’t know how to use the article databases fully?
I stand by my search results. In fact, I can prove them to be right on target. The number of 68 publications can be traced to Discovery Institute's profile of Gonzalez dated May 2007. I ran two searches that corroborate this number as well as my earlier numbers. The results of the searches are summarized in two screenshots here: http://imgur.com/a/ArB7H The first search was for all papers published by G. Gonzalez with affiliation names including Iowa, Washington, or Bangalore, and published in 1987-2007. I excluded works coauthored by LIGO collaboration that includes Gabriela Gonzalez (NOT Abbott) and chapters of the astronomy textbook (NOT Oesper). This search turned up 69 publications in agreement with the Discovery Institute count. The peak publication years were 1998 (13) and 1999 (10), and 2000 (7), Gonzalez's postdoctoral years at U Washington. The second search was the same, except the affiliation name was limited to Iowa. The result was 18 publications with the numbers consistent with my previous comment. The numbers were revised downward: 1 fewer publication in 2003 and 2005. (I probably did not fully exclude some LIGO papers in my previous search.) Again, the results of the searches, including the search strings, can be seen in the screenshots linked above. The full paper counts (69) is consistent with the DIscovery Institute count. 18 of them were published under Iowa State affiliation. The first 8 of these were the last results of postdoctoral work, so Gonzalez's publishing output as a faculty was 10 papers. Timaeus, if you wish to dispute these numbers, be my guest and show the results of your own search. Bragging about hours spent on the internet won't win you many points in my book.skram
February 5, 2015
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Apparently my comments are held in a moderation queue. Never mind, I'll post this one again.skram
February 5, 2015
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franklin: My remarks about his book being held against him were not speculation, but documented fact. But in your atheist world, facts don't matter; the only thing that matters is that anyone who supports ID should be stopped, by hook or by crook, from ever being admitted to a doctoral program, or, if that cannot be prevented, from ever graduating, or, if that cannot be prevented, from ever getting a tenure-track job, or, if that cannot be prevented, from ever getting tenure. By the way, your remark "you are not going to succeed in academia if ..." is full of chutzpah (since you yourself appear to have had no success in any branch of academia and therefore appear unable to speak from real-life experience), and, as a generalization, wrong. At most it is true of certain natural and engineering sciences which are corruptly tied in with the military-industrial-government research complex. It certainly is not true of the "Arts" subjects. You can do all kinds of productive research in the Arts subjects without having to secure outside grants. All you need is a good library and a good brain. As for all your yapping about supervising graduate students, I could (but won't) name a person with a Ph.D. in my own department who was given tenure after the normal 5-year period, who had not during that period supervised a single graduate student, and, after obtaining tenure, taught for decades while supervising only 1 Ph.D. student during the entire time. The most powerful faction in the department wanted him in there, even though he was academically useless to the department, because he was an ally of their vision and guaranteed them enough votes to run the department the way they wanted to. The idea that hiring and tenure decisions are made purely with a view to merit, that there is no politics in them, is incredibly naive, in any walk of life, and in the university world most of all. You shouldn't make grand generalizations about academia when you don't have sufficient experience of the many different parts of the academic world. But of course that's another fault of popular atheist writers -- the grand generalization. E.g., ID is always "creationism" even though Behe and many other IDers are not creationists; no ID person has ever published a peer-reviewed work even though they have published scores of them; "the courts" have ruled that ID is religion and unconstitutional even though only *one* court has ruled on ID and that ruling has authority only in one local district; "the Republicans" -- the entire Party of course -- are making a "war on science" -- when in fact it is only certain Republicans who are critical of only certain particular scientific theories, and in fact often not of any scientific theory but only of certain applications of science in fields such as medicine where there are grave ethical issues at stake; etc. The atheists have learned the techniques of dictators well -- make grand sweeping pronouncements, without any proper qualifications. Qualifications blunt the rhetorical force of one's claims, and slow down the progress of achieving one's agenda, which is the destruction of one's political or social enemies. Interestingly, Gonzalez eventually got another science teaching job, at a university which had every opportunity to review his history at ISU and reject him as unsuitable if it thought he lacked merit. And sure enough, anti-ID forces started protesting the decision regarding the *new* job as well. The idea that there is no antecedent prejudice in the academic world against ID proponents is too ignorant to be seriously entertained. Whether the documented prejudice against Gonzalez was the decisive factor at ISU, no one will ever know, because most of the conversations that determined his fate were *in camera*, and were and always will be off the record. However, this much can be said: we know there was virulent antecedent prejudice on the campus, and we know that academics are the best people in the world at not leaving paper trails to unjust and partisan actions. (Richard Nixon was a clumsy incompetent, compared to academics who want to make sure that certain friends get research grants or jobs, and that certain enemies don't. If Nixon had had advice from university Presidents and department heads, instead of from political aides and lawyers, he might well have weathered the Watergate scandal.) So if G.'s ID views were a factor in the decision -- as we know they were -- it would be very hard to prove exactly *how big* a factor, given the well-honed techniques of secrecy and manipulation practiced daily in the universities of America. And certainly almost no university President in the country -- even if he had full knowledge of a clearly prejudicial decision -- would have blown the whistle on his scientific colleagues if he thought that overruling them in a tenure decision involving an ID supporter would alienate future potential research grant sources for his science departments. Most university Presidents would, without an instant's hesitation, sacrifice an individual on the altar of institutional expediency. That's the kind of animal university Presidents are.Timaeus
February 5, 2015
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Timeaus<blockquote.You are also completely morally wrong to to say that Gonzalez’ popular book, written in his own spare time, should have had any influence on the decision. He (gonzalez) insisted that the book be included in his merit review. Of course it is open to scrutiny and entered into the decision...by Gonzalez;s choice! timeaus
So the fact that G. wrote the book would have been held against him, whether he mentioned it on his c.v. or not.
This is, of course, complete speculation on your part and ignores the fact that if included on his c.v. it, and its contents, are open for consideration. timaeus
one voting member on the committee admitted that the views G. advocated in the book were a factor in his thinking, so I’m not merely speculating.
Why should it be a surprise that a committee member considered the contents of Gonzalez's c.v. and found it lacking on substance given that lack of peer review for a vanity publication? gonzalez opened the door when he included it on his c.v.....no one to blame but himself. timaeus<blockquote.I’ve never said that it was a 100% sure thing that Gonzalez would have got tenure, were it not for the prejudice. I admit that the public reasons *might* be legitimate, that possibly he would have fallen short even by fair and objective judgment.<. there was no reason to expect Gonzalez to obtain tenure at ISU given his dismal academic performance when he was cut loose from his mentors and set out on his own to establish his own lab. I know of no individual who would be given tenure given Gonzalez's performance at ISU. You are not going to succeed in academia (t the tenure level) if you have demonstrated that you cannot obtain funding, cannot fund graduate students, successfully mentor zero graduate students, initiate no original lines of research, ect., ect. Ho wmany more reasons does a tenure committee need for rejection? Any single item is pause for consideration by any institute. timeausIt’s because you can’t grant *anything* to the very reasonable suspicion of prejudice that you yourself are unreasonable and partisan. Like most internet atheists. I am only looking at his performance record while he was on probation at ISU. It is you who are ignoring the basic merit performance milestones that Gonzalez failed to obtain while trying to create a religious martyr out of out right failure on Gonzalez's part to demonstrate he would be a competent and productive researcher at ISU. but let's give you the benifit of the doubt on the facts and give you the opportunity to correct all us 'internet atheists': How many graduate students and post docs did gonzalez have working in his lab? How many graduate students were successfully mentored to matriculation while under Gonzalez's mentorship? How many grants were funded to Gonzalez to fund graduate student (and his own) research? How many tenure candidates do you know of you inluded a vanity press publication on their c.v. for merit review? do you think this was a wise move on his part? What original lines of research was Gonzalez, and his MS, Ph.d and postdocs pursing (should be ample evidence from conference proceedings, poster, oral presentations)? As someone who knows this case and all its nuances these questions and your answers should set all us 'internet atheists" straight! And FYI..there is no 'might' have fallen short in meeting tenure requirements he absolutely failed on almost every front and there is no one to blame except himself.franklin
February 4, 2015
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Franklin: You are wrong about many of the facts. You should research before you speak. Or if you know all the facts, you are suppressing many that do not support your interpretation. You are also completely morally wrong to to say that Gonzalez' popular book, written in his own spare time, should have had any influence on the decision. It should have had no influence one way or the other -- unless you would say that if Carl Sagan wrote an atheistical book that it would be equally right for Christian professors to let the atheism of the book influence their tenure decision. And you know little about academic jobs, obviously, or you would know that "citizenship" is one thing that people document on their records, and popular books count as part of general university or community citizenship. There is nothing wrong with indicating such a thing. And even if he had never put it on his c.v., *everyone* at ISU knew about the book anyway -- the agitation of atheist Hector Avalos -- professionally improper -- saw to that. So the fact that G. wrote the book would have been held against him, whether he mentioned it on his c.v. or not. And of course as I have repeatedly said -- to which you turn a deaf ear -- one voting member on the committee admitted that the views G. advocated in the book were a factor in his thinking, so I'm not merely speculating. But you conveniently overlook these facts. I've never said that it was a 100% sure thing that Gonzalez would have got tenure, were it not for the prejudice. I admit that the public reasons *might* be legitimate, that possibly he would have fallen short even by fair and objective judgment. But what you and your atheist thug friends keep trying to deny is that there *was* a prejudice -- that there were people at ISU who personally did not like ID or G.'s endorsement of it, and that this gave them strong motivation to interpret his application in a negative way. It's because you can't grant *anything* to the very reasonable suspicion of prejudice that you yourself are unreasonable and partisan. Like most internet atheists.Timaeus
February 4, 2015
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Timaeus
But of course the elephant in the room, which all of you are ignoring (as all atheists in the debate do), is that we *know* that there was a prior prejudice against Gonzalez because of his ID book, and we *know* of at least one person on the actual committee that admitted that Gonzalez’s conclusions in that book were a factor in his decision to vote against Gonzalez.
Gonzalez chose to include his book as part of his merit review against the advice of his committee. So, of course, it would come under scrutiny. No one to blame but Gonzalez himself. Timaeus
It was cited only as one of other factors, the most important of which were not getting enough telescope time and not bringing in enough grant money.
It is quite a fatal blow to anyone who is/was/should have been working to establish original research in astronomy in their new lab when they are unable to successfully solicit funding which is needed for telescope time....which is needed to conduct original research. Gonzalez failed in this regard. He was unable to successfully start the lab he was required to develop as pat of his tenure probationary period and as a result of his failure he was unable to conduct any original research while at ISU (a fact admitted by his previous mentor) as well as not graduating any masters or doctoral students. This is not something that any tenure committee is going to look favorably upon. Again, no one to blame but Gonzalez himself. Timaeus
A true scholar or scientist will support the hiring and tenure of someone whose conclusions he *hates* with every fiber of his being, provided that person meets the standards of academic and teaching excellence. I despise Christians who would manipulate the academic system for Christian ends, just as much as I despise atheists who would manipulate it for their ends.
While Gonzalez was under the care of mentors he was successful and it was this success that prompted ISU to give him a shot at tenure at their facility..However there are well established milestones that must be met before tenure is granted. Gonzalez was warned by his committee that he was not making the grade and needed to up his game...he did not rise to the occasion. No tenure committee is going to overlook the lack of establishment of a lab that is capable and in the process of conducting original research. No tenure committee is going to overlook the failure to solicit funding for telescope time and funding of graduate students. It is a major requirement at a facility tasked with training and educating new scientists......it is why they exist. Gonzalez's past performance got him the chance to demonstrate what he was/is capable of doing when given his own lab (no doubt with seed money from ISU) and a shot at being the 'boss' of his own lab he failed miserably.... on all measures while he was at ISU. How you, Timaeus, conveniently overlook these errors, any of which would be the death knell for any tenure candidate, is beyond reason.franklin
February 4, 2015
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Aurelio Smith: Did you follow the case at all? Did you read the final statement of the President of ISU justifying the firing of Gonzalez? (And yes, "firing" is the practical reality of tenure denial, so that that is the right word.) The publishing record of Gonzalez was not cited as the major reason for his tenure denial. It was cited only as one of other factors, the most important of which were not getting enough telescope time and not bringing in enough grant money. (In fact, it was openly admitted that the minimum standard of publications -- at least 15 during the measurement period -- had been met by Gonzalez.) As for skram's reasonings about which of Gonzalez's publications "count" and which don't, they are *skram*'s reasoning, years after the fact. skram has not provided *one ounce* of evidence that anyone on the actual tenure committee came to the same conclusions about the same articles. He wasn't there; he is speculating. But of course the elephant in the room, which all of you are ignoring (as all atheists in the debate do), is that we *know* that there was a prior prejudice against Gonzalez because of his ID book, and we *know* of at least one person on the actual committee that admitted that Gonzalez's conclusions in that book were a factor in his decision to vote against Gonzalez. And we also know, based on the way university administrations work (indeed, the way *all* organizations work when their self-interest is perceived by them to be at stake), that *if* there was improper discrimination against Gonzalez, the administration certainly would not have indicated that in its justification of the process. Can you imagine the President saying, "Frankly, most of us here as ISU think that ID is lousy science and creationism in a cheap tuxedo, and we don't want anyone who supports it teaching at this school, no matter how good a teacher he is and no matter how brilliant an astrophysicist he is, not even if he promises never to teach it in class or mention it in his peer-reviewed publications, so we sacked this turkey so we could hire a good atheist astronomer who, even if he was no better in teaching or research, would at least not embarrass ISU by his presence on the faculty." There isn't a university President in the United States of America who would ever make such an admission, even if all of it were true. I'm weary of arguing with hard-nosed atheists about this. The fact is: (1) Not *one* atheist who has defended the Gonzalez decision on internet sites was in the relevant department at ISU at the time: (2) Not *one* atheist who has defended the Gonzalez decision on internet sites was at ISU in *any* capacity at the time; (3) Not *one* atheist in these internet debates actually holds a Ph.D. in Gonzalez's field and therefore has sufficient insider knowledge of the normal standards; (4) Not *one* atheist in these internet debates has had the intellectual honesty to admit that there was clearly a prior prejudice against Gonzalez *above and beyond anything to do with objective performance measurements*, and that the prior prejudice was directly due to the fact that he had endorsed ID, and that at least in principle that could have been a major factor in the minds of most or all of the people voting on the tenure decision. So basically, these internet debates are waste of time: a bunch of atheist drugstore cowboys with no firsthand knowledge of Gonzalez's specific field, who have not read Gonzalez's technical work, have condemned him as part of atheist tribalism. If just *one* atheist would give a *nuanced* account of the Gonzalez case, granting that there were some grounds for suspicion regarding the objectivity of the process and participants, I might be willing to discuss this further. But all the atheist internet commentators are 100% partisan, and willing to make up their minds on rumor, hearsay, and quick lookups and superficial analysis of a very limited set of data relevant to the decision, so none of them are worth arguing with. Both academic and personal honesty are deeply lacking in every atheist commenter I have debated with. Notice that this has nothing to do with whether or not ID is true. The point is that even for someone who thinks ID is complete crap, his endorsement of ID should have counted for *zero* in the tenure decision -- and there are very strong reasons for believing that it counted for considerably more than zero. My own morality in this issue is clear. If exactly the same situation had prevailed in reverse, with Carl Sagan getting the boot rather than Gonzalez, I would go to bat for Sagan, and would be extremely skeptical of the statements of Christian administrators, even though I myself am Christian. If I found out they fired Sagan *because of his atheist views* -- or even that his atheist views were a significant factor in his firing -- I would denounce the Christians involved as hypocrites, unworthy of the name Christian, and as dishonest academics who were letting their personal religious views influence what should have been a purely professional decision. And I would urge all Christian parents never to send their children to such a university again, in hopes that the drop in tuition money would bankrupt the place and all the dishonest Christian faculty would lose their jobs. That's how strongly I feel about neutrality in these matters. A true scholar or scientist will support the hiring and tenure of someone whose conclusions he *hates* with every fiber of his being, provided that person meets the standards of academic and teaching excellence. I despise Christians who would manipulate the academic system for Christian ends, just as much as I despise atheists who would manipulate it for their ends. The fact is that many of the best scholars and scientists in the world today are unemployed because of the personal ideological prejudices of the faculty responsible for their hiring and tenure. And many lesser scholars and scientists have jobs for life, because they are on the right side of the current consensus, whether that consensus be religious, cultural, methodological, pedagogical, or something else. This is wrong. It's the moral responsibility of those doing the hiring to consider *only academic merit* -- not particular academic or scientific opinions -- in deciding who should have a career and who shouldn't.Timaeus
February 4, 2015
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