I don’t think this was accurate. It seems he was publishing well, and doing good and new research on the habitable zones of galaxies.
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That is not a valid reason to refuse tenure.
Didn’t he have them from another source of funding? His publication record was fine, better than benchmarks in his department. It was unusual that the biology department and others go involved in his tenure decision.
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The only funding I am aware of came from the Templeton Foundation for writing an Intelligent Design book.
As to his publications, the main complaint seems to be that the papers were based on work he had done before reaching Iowa State. From the previous link:
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Eddie, you do realize that Christians make up 70% of the US population. So even at a secular university a majority identify as Christians. They may be just CINOs (Christian in name only) nonetheless, Christians are still the overwhelming majority in this country.
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It clearly was a factor for one of those voting. In an interview afterward, he admitted that Gonzalez’s Privileged Planet views influenced his vote. I can’t give you the link from memory, but I read the interview myself. And that’s counting only the colleague who admitted openly to his prejudice; there could have been others who wouldn’t admit openly to it. (There had also been a campaign, mounted against Gonzalez by an atheist professor of Bible (!) teaching in the Religious Studies department there, in an attempt to persuade the university and the astronomy dept. not to give Gonzalez tenure – an unprofessional and highly improper form of academic interference, in my view. So the astronomy dept. was keenly aware that other faculty at the university would make a fuss if he got tenure. Can you imagine a History professor aggressively campaigning against the tenure of a population genetics professor at St. Louis?)
I’m of course sensitive to these things, being in a field (Religious Studies) where hiring and tenure decisions are heavily influenced by the prejudices of the existing faculty who are making the decisions. I’m keenly aware that faculty do sometimes allow their personal tastes, cultural agendas, etc. to come into play when making professional decisions. I’m willing to believe that this happens less often in science, but scientists are still human and still have prejudices, so I won’t easily be convinced that it never happens at all, especially in the area of “origins”, given that origins is such a highly charged subject on the American scene. And the Gonzalez case was about origins, because of the contents of his book.
Francis Collins wrote his book after he had tenure, and after he was universally respected for his scientific achievements. If he had been a junior professor, without tenure, and was not yet famous as head of the Human Genome Project, I doubt very much he would have published The Language of God at the age at which Gonzalez published Privileged Planet; I think he would have waited until after he had tenure, to play it safe. That would have been the prudent thing to do.
The ideas alone would have marked him as kindred with the ID people, so whether or not he had formal association with them wouldn’t have mattered. If you write a book claiming that the laws of cosmology appear to be established for the purpose of allowing human existence and human scientific discovery, you are making a design argument, a teleological argument, based on cosmological science, and one that is obviously favorable to the existence of a Creator God. If he had never met an ID person or even heard of ID, those views would not have been liked by a good many of the professors in his department, because they would seem to be marshaling science to prove the existence of God. And one can be sure that even if he had no obvious connection to other ID people, after reading his book Eugenie Scott and the NCSE would have been (as they did regarding the Nature of Nature conference and in the Sternberg case) trying to dig up hidden private connections to show that Gonzalez was connected with the ID movement, and if they found anything, would have been writing to the Iowa State astronomy professors privately to urge them not to give the man tenure.
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Dr. Collins was unanimously confirmed by the Senate.
https://nihrecord.nih.gov/newsletters/2009/08_21_2009/story1.htm
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You’re attempting to justify the decision in the Gonzalez case, using the officially published talking points presented by the university to defend its decision. I said I won’t get involved in it. Every single one of your statements is a half-truth, taking one interpretation (the department’s interpretation, the university’s interpretation) and there is another possible interpretation. I could counter-argue, but I know from bitter experience that not a single internet atheist has ever or will ever change his mind on the Gonzalez case – even though not one internet atheist against Gonzalez was at Iowa State at the time or has any inside insight on the academic culture there, in the department or at the university – so I won’t bother. In any case, I grant it’s a possibility that he might not have received tenure anyway. The fact is that one of his own faculty colleagues admitted to prejudice against the religious flavor of Gonzalez’s book, over and above any reservations he had regarding the formal qualifications – and that objection is professionally improper. That’s the only point I’m arguing for here.
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Exactly. Coyne barked. No one listened. No one cared. Why is it that everyone complains about this over and over?
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Christopher Hitchens speaking about the necessity for mockery of religion. Also speaking about blasphemy.
Not the majority of faculty – not by a long shot. The religious composition of university faculty is way out of synch with that of the general population. (As the social/political views of university faculty are way out of synch with those of the general population.) And it’s the alleged prejudice of faculty, not the religion of the students, that is the issue here. Christians often fear that university faculty, especially in biology, are hostile. (And of course they know that the faculty in Women’s Studies and many of the social sciences are largely hostile.)
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Obviously, because it showed the existence of anti-Christian prejudice in a leading evolutionary scientist teaching at one of America’s leading universities. Collins’s achievement by that time was so great that Coyne’s complaints had no effect on his getting the job (though they may have had a role in the restrictions Collins accepted when he took up the position), and that’s a good thing, that merit was the decisive factor. But against such prejudice, if it were exercised against a younger, untenured professor in a lesser-known state university, would the younger professor prevail? That’s the fear, that this prejudice exists, and is found in more people than Jerry Coyne. The blogs of P.Z. Myers, the public diatribes of Dawkins, etc. all of which go largely unopposed by other atheist and agnostic scientists (of whom there are many in America’s science departments), suggest to Christians that this could be a very real problem for young Christian scientists in weaker positions.
It is prejudice not held by the majority of scientists. He got zero traction. That is the real story.
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Dr. Collins even addressed the criticism in his confirmation hearing and assured all Senators that the NIH would be run as a secular institution. And to his credit, Dr. Collins has done an exemplary job as Director of NIH. I believe this is always mention is because Christians like to play the prosecution card even though they are in the majority by a wide margin. If all the atheists in the Senate voted against Dr. Collins the vote would still have been 100 to 0 unanimous. (as there has never been an atheist Senator in the US Senate).
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Probably true – and a devout, politically conservative scientist would probably be the least welcome of them all!
I’ll disagree with the apparent implication there.
I do not oppose PZ Myers for the same reason that I do not oppose Christian bloggers. I support freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
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That is the real story in the Collins case. It may not be the real story in scores of departments across the land, where Coyne-equivalents and PZ Myers-equivalents may be trying to influence hiring and tenure decisions involving young Christian scientists. That is the fear. There would be less fear if atheist scientists spoke up sharply in public against the anti-religious chip on the shoulder of their atheist colleagues. But almost all the public hears from the atheist scientists is how badly the fundamentalists behave, not how badly Coyne, Myers, Dawkins, Krauss, etc. behave. A little self-policing by the atheist scientific community would go a long way in restoring public confidence in the fairness of scientists.
Just to be clear, Neil, I’m not asking you or anyone to deny Myers his freedom of speech, or freedom to be an atheist. I think Myers has the right to say anything he wants to – on a website that he personally is paying for, not one paid for by the presumably publicly-funded University of Minnesota. I’m not asking atheist scientists to oppose Myers’s right to express his opinion. I’m only asking them to say out loud that Myers’s anti-religious axe-grinding is not representative of “science”, not even when the science is done by other atheists.
I’m asking atheists in science to recognize that the average Christian, reading the blogs of Coyne or Myers, would not feel confident that if Coyne or Myers were on a hiring or tenure review committee for their Christian son or daughter, they would be able to keep their personal anti-religious feelings out of it. That is the PR problem which modern science faces in America, coming out of these origins debates.
I think I do that from time to time. But, unlike PZ, I don’t have a big following.
It is a valid concern. However, unless it were a very close case, it would probably have little effect on the outcome. Most scientists are fair minded on these issues.
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American Atheists are too busy speaking up against Fundamentalist Christians trying to get prayer, bible, ID, YEC and Jesus back into the public schools. FFRF handles over 1000 complaints a year and it is increasing not decreasing with time.