Getting tenure at a University is tough. There are a million hoops to jump through, and those hoops can be set mighty high. Even being a brilliant scientist doesn’t guarantee you tenure… and certainly, promoting complete and utter antiscientific drivel doesn’t help. Guillermo Gonzalez, an advocate of Intelligent Design, has been denied tenure at the University of Iowa Iowa State. The Discovery Institute claims it’s from bias.
I certainly hope so. I want to see scientific departments being biased against antiscience.
But you don’t need to know my opinion of all this; it’s obvious enough. So instead go read what Christopher O’Brien, Rob Knop, and Ed Brayton have to say. I imagine this will be quite the topic on science blogs for a day or two.
May 16th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
Almost as bad as the Scientologists! Boo hoo, everybody is picking on us because we’re a bunch of half witted crackpots. Err, yeah, what did you expect?
May 16th, 2007 at 1:20 pm
From the Evolution News website:
“…astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, co-author of The Privileged Planet, which presents powerful scientific evidence for the intelligent design of the universe.”
Yeah right. Evidence so powerful virtually all of the other astronomers reject it. “I feel in my heart God did it therefore it must be true.”
Has he played the Galileo persecution card yet?
May 16th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
Just to clarify things, the quote in my post above is from the Discovery Institute’s Evolution News & Views web page that Phil linked to.
May 16th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
Oops–I think it’s Iowa State University, not the University of Iowa.
May 16th, 2007 at 1:32 pm
Although there has been some indication (Gerard Harbison) that he had not brought in any grant money to the University and that his track record of publications had fallen off considerably since joining the faculty at Iowa State, I agree with Prof. Plait that he he should of been denied tenure on the basis of being a whackjob. I strongly suspect that his colleagues were quite reluctant to to add another Arthur Butz, Michael Behe, Peter Deusberg or Brian Josephson type to their tenured faculty.
May 16th, 2007 at 1:59 pm
Oops. Fixed the Iowa mistake. Ironically, SLC, I am not a professor! I’m just staff here… and only for another 6 days anyway.
May 16th, 2007 at 2:08 pm
Since the Discovery Institute is so concerned, perhaps they’ll grant him tenure instead?
May 16th, 2007 at 4:20 pm
Perhaps coincidentally, I have read several discusions of the tenure process (mostly on cosmicvariance.com and Rob Knop’s site) in the last few days. In addition, a friend of mine has recently shared with me his deep resentment over being denied tenure. He is, at the moment, a very unhappy camper.
I am first struck by the gut-wrenching nature of the bifurcation. On the one-hand lies the possibility of a secure lifetime position, and on the other, the prospect of being torn from one’s first choice of a career.
May 16th, 2007 at 4:46 pm
Do any astronomers ’round these parts have a sense of Gonzalez’s professional reputation in the astronomy community? He got a fair bit of work published, but e.g. if his book The Privileged Planet was viewed as cranky then that would be a significant negative in both internal and external evaluations.
May 16th, 2007 at 8:34 pm
A science department that will not give tenure to creationists,”well duh”.
May 16th, 2007 at 8:45 pm
From what I’ve gathered on other blogs discussing this case, getting tenure is something of a crapshoot. One can meet all the stated criteria and still run afoul of personality clashes and so forth.
So even if Gonzalez did original research, brought in grant money, published books and peer-reviewed papers, etc., that wouldn’t have necessarily guaranteed a tenured position. Unfair, but so is a lot of life.
That he also promoted the latest dressed-up Creationist collywollop was probably not a plus.
May 16th, 2007 at 8:45 pm
I am first struck by the gut-wrenching nature of the bifurcation. On the one-hand lies the possibility of a secure lifetime position, and on the other, the prospect of being torn from one’s first choice of a career.
It sucks on toast, man. Push-one-deep-into-clinical-depression kind of suckage.
Do any astronomers ’round these parts have a sense of Gonzalez’s professional reputation in the astronomy community?
I don’t really know much about his actual published work. Astronomers who have heard of him have mainly heard of him because of his public notoriety as an DI fellow and ID proponent. “Our worst enemy” is the term I heard one astronomer use to describe him once. Suffice to say that amongst at least a fair subset of the astronomy community, he did not have a good reputation, but it was entirely from his public work.
Browsing adsabs.harvard.edu, it seems that his professional work was on spectroscopy of stars hosting extrasolar planets. That’s pretty far out of my field, so I wouldn’t likely have run across it myself. A quick perusal makes it look like respectable stuff.
-Rob
May 17th, 2007 at 5:02 am
If you haven’t yet read what Rob Knop had to say on tenure, I recommend the link to his blog. Very illuminating for us non-academicians. Say, is this Gonzalez the same one who used to be the attorney general? Oh, wait, that’s wishful thinking. Must be his half-wit brother.
May 17th, 2007 at 8:24 am
Phil said: “I want to see scientific departments being biased against antiscience.”
Why not accentuate the positive rather than the negative?
We want to see scientific departments being biased *in favour of science* – genuine science. It’s what science departments are about, after all.
It’s not then quite so easy for the whackos to to whinge about that bias without outright admitting that they are anti-science.
If they do admit they’re anti-real science, then they’re cutting the ground out from under their own feet. IYSWIM?
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July 9th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
[...] "Intelligent Design" "think tank" has given money to Guillermo Gonzalez, who was denied tenure at Iowa State U for not doing anything he needed to do to actually get tenure. Things like, oh say, publish papers [...]