Bias Against Guillermo Gonzalez (Privileged Planet)?

Conversation Side Conversation
82

I’m not contesting this, but it surprises me, so would you answer some questions for me?

I just looked up the Chemistry department at the University of Michigan. I found there a list of 59 Faculty members, four of whom had the rank of Lecturer, and the rest of whom had the ranks of Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Professor.

Am I correct in assuming that everyone from Assistant Professor on up would be either tenured or tenure-track?

If so, then the equation 55 = 30/100x, where x is the total number of chemistry faculty members at the school, yields the solution x = 183.

Does that mean that the University of Michigan’s chemistry department has approximately 183 faculty members, 55 of whom are tenured or tenure-track, and the other 128 of whom are lecturers, or something less? And of those 128, are they all full-time faculty, or just part-time faculty, teaching maybe only a course or two every school year, or serving only as teaching assistants, graders, etc.? Or are most of those 128 researchers only, doing stuff in labs on short-term contracts, but not teaching anyone at all? And do all 128 of the extra people have a vote at Chemistry department meetings?

I’m not trying to be at all sarcastic; I really don’t understand what your percentage means. I’m trying to envision a chemistry department with 55 professors plus 128 other Ph.D.s who are hanging around, some doing some research, some doing some teaching, but most of whom have little to no hope of permanent employment in the department. It seems to me that considerations of office space alone, let alone budgetary and other considerations, would make the accommodation of such a large number of hanger-ons problematic.

In the Arts part of the university, at least of most universities I’m familiar with, a department of, say, Philosophy, might have maybe 20 tenured or tenure-track professors, maybe one or two Lecturers (hired specifically to teach, and only to teach) on one-year or two-year contracts, and, under extremely rare circumstances, maybe one visiting post-doctoral fellow – and that only in a place with a BIG philosophy graduate program. There might also be a half-dozen other transient teachers hired to fill in one-course gaps for the current year, and of course there might be a few dozen grad students serving as teaching assistants, graders, etc. But none of the short-term or part-time or post-doc people or teaching assistants would be called “faculty” – only the Assistant, Associate, and full Professors (and maybe, in rare cases, one or two Permanent Lecturers) – would be called “Faculty”. In other words, the penumbra of non-core employees would be nowhere near as large as what you are suggesting is routinely the case in scientific subjects. Can you clarify the situation for me? Who are the missing 70% of the people hanging around, and what exactly do they do to earn their salaries? And why are they hanging around, if the odds of ever gaining permanent university employment their field are only 3 out of 10?

83

The problem is, the University of Michigan Chemistry department is far from average.

There are two aspects to the issue:

  1. Most (if not all, I’m not exactly sure) public universities have tenure, but they also often rely increasingly on contingent (adjunct (part time) or lecturer/instructor (full-time) non-tenure track) positions. Several states have been working on legislation to get weaken or eliminate tenure, i.e. Wisconsin. Some disciplines also rely more heavily on contingent faculty (chemistry departments at PhD public universities usually has a significant number of graduate teaching assistants). You might also think about community colleges. Many rely on a few full-time faculty and armies of part-time adjuncts picked from a “pool”.

  2. Private universities can do whatever they want regarding tenure. The big name private research universities like Harvard or WashU often have tenure but many of the small or religiously-affiliated schools do not. The denomination my university is affiliated with has 8 university in the US and roughly half have tenure – so it varies school to school. Remember there are almost 3 times as many private colleges & universities as public.

So in the end it’s a combination of an increasing number of contingent faculty and the large number of private colleges & universities that may or may not have tenure that gets you to 30% faculty overall having tenure.

They are indeed faculty, just a different category of faculty. They may have no vote in the faculty meeting, but they may teach a significant number (if not a majority) of the courses. At my university we have 2 full-time English faculty and maybe 10 adjuncts that teach English courses. In my department we have 11 full-time faculty and 40 adjuncts mostly for lower-level math courses and specialty health science courses. It depends on the universities willingness to pay for a full-time position. I have an adjunct teach my General Chemistry labs (no grad TAs here) while I’m teaching General Chemistry lecture, a general education chemistry course, the General Physics lecture, and an upper-division Statistical Mechanics/Thermodynamics course.

The adjuncts get per course contract pay with no benefits. You would have a very hard time making a living as an adjunct at my school. Most who do it have at least part-time jobs elsewhere or are stay-at-home parents wanting to earn some extra money by working a few hours a week. We have one math adjunct in my department that has taught nearly a full-time load for at least the last 8 years, without benefits and for half the pay that a full-time faculty member would get. She has a PhD but also takes care of her elderly mother. She does do committee meetings or advising or research, etc. A full-time faculty member, even at a primarily undergraduate /teaching focused institution like mine, does a lot more than teach.

1 Like
84

Thanks very much, Jordan. That is helpful. I now see where the low % figure comes from.

I was instinctively excluding community colleges, but since you said “academia” rather than “universities”, I shouldn’t have.

When you say “graduate teaching assistants”, are you talking about people who help run undergrad chemistry labs, grade undergrad lab reports, give tutorials to help students with homework problem sets, help professors grade exams, etc., but don’t offer courses, lecture, set exams, attend faculty meetings, etc.? Such people are of course valuable assets to a department, but I wouldn’t normally think of them as “faculty”; to me “faculty” means the people who offer and are the principal teachers in undergraduate and graduate courses (who at larger schools also do research as well).

I also wouldn’t normally think of post-doctoral researchers (at least, those who do no teaching of either graduate or undergraduate students) as “faculty”, since they aren’t available to the student body as instructors. But maybe the term “faculty” is used more broadly in Science subjects than in Arts subjects, and can include researchers who never interact with students. Anyhow, maybe you weren’t including such non-teaching persons as faculty in your calculation of the 30% figure.

Only two English professors? Only 11 Chemistry professors? I’m trying to get a handle on that, for comparison. What is the undergraduate population at your school? And graduate student population?

85

Right, graduate teaching assistants and postdocs aren’t considered faculty, however, contingent faculty (part-time adjuncts or full-time non-tenure track) are. The are the “instructor of record”, etc.

Worse than that. I am one of 2 chemists. My department houses 11 faculty (2 math, 2 chemistry, 1 physics, 3 biology, 1 computer science, 2 kineseology/athletic training). The university as a whole has 1,600 students but only ~800 traditional undergraduates. I teach all chemistry courses that are not organic or biochemistry and help out in physics a bit. My undergraduate degree is from a public university with (at the time) ~900 students that was fairly similar. They had 1 physicist, 1 chemist, 3 mathematicians, 2 geologists, and I think 3 biologists in their science department.

2 Likes
86

Good – we have the same understanding of those terms. But tell me, would contingent faculty have Ph.D.s, in most cases?

Ah, I see. You teach in a “science” department, not specifically a chemistry department. I was envisioning a chemistry department.

Ah, OK, I understand now. I was thinking of institutions of greater size – 6,000, 8,000, 10,000, and up. Normally such places would have separate departments for chemistry, physics, etc.

What denomination is your school associated with?

87

It varies quite a bit. Our accreditor (the Higher Learning Commission, responsible for the central US) requires that all instructors have a Master’s degree in the teaching area (or at least 18 graduate hours and relevant industry experience). Our primary math adjunct has a PhD, but I think most are Master’s level.

The Church of the Nazarene, it’s the largest Wesleyan-holiness denomination (~2.4 million total global members). They have a strong emphasis on higher education with 8 liberal arts colleges in the US, 1 in Canada, 1 in Africa, and 1 in South Korea. There are also 5 seminaries scattered around the world along with many specialty (bible, nursing) school outside the US.

My school does not require faculty to be members of any particular denomination so there is a fairly large broad representation of theological thought, which I like. Also, the official church doctrine on creation is:

Creation. The Church of the Nazarene believes in the biblical account of creation (“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”—Genesis 1:1). We are open to scientific explanations on the nature of creation while opposing any interpretation of the origin of the universe and of humankind that rejects God as the Creator (Hebrews 11:3)

Compared to Bioloa this one is very open, which is good and bad, and one of the reasons I was attracted to this university.

Anyway, that’s probably more than you needed or wanted. :slight_smile:

88

No; it’s all interesting to me.

I had some previous knowledge of Nazarenes, but they became larger in my consciousness due to BioLogos, which under Falk and Giberson was run by Nazarenes – and featured several Nazarene guest columnists as well.

I gather that there was some tension between some folks in the Nazarene denomination and some of the statements made by Falk and Giberson on BioLogos, but I’m not up on the details.

Are you at either Falk or Giberson’s college?

89

Yes, there is significant tension (not so much with Falk, but Giberson and certainly Oord). The denomination, as far as I can tell, tries to be a big tent holding together some Fundamentalist congregations (mostly in rural/Midwest areas) along with broadly Evangelical (Billy Graham, Christianity Today types) congregations.

Falk was from our west coast college (Point Loma) and Giberson was from our east coast college (Eastern Nazarene). They were mostly fine within their contexts but on the national stage there were probably some influential people who would not be pleased with any non-YEC interpretations. One of the reasons I was happy to find a Nazarene school looking for a chemist when I was looking for a job after my postdoc was that I had seen Falk working with BioLogos and was impressed with his generosity towards others and willingness to tackle some tough issues.

Now, I happened to land at the Nazarene school considered to be the most conservative (in decidedly non-coastal Kansas). It was actually built largely as a conservative reaction to “liberal take over” during the Vietnam War. It has changed a lot since that time but it’s still a denominational school in the Bible Belt of America. It just means we have to be very careful to be respectful of others, find common ground, and be willing to ask forgiveness if we mess up … kinda like Peaceful Science :smile:

1 Like
90

Thanks for all this background, Jordan. It’s always helpful to know where people are coming from.

91

That wasn’t left out. You will notice that publications are just one of the criteria.

In my experience, the facts don’t matter to some people. They think there is discrimination and no amount of facts will budge them from this position.

2 Likes
92

I already granted, several times I think, that Gonzalez might not have received tenure anyway, even had no prejudice been operating. But only someone willfully blind to the situation at Iowa State (the prior campaign against Gonzalez which poisoned the well), and to the confession of one of the voting members that Gonzalez’s views on design (as expressed in his book) did influence his vote, would pretend that there was no prejudice operating. The President, in his report, whitewashes all of that – as university administrators are prone to do. He would have the public believe that nothing was going on in the minds of the people voting other than strictly objective rules about granting tenure. But nobody who has studied the case believes that – except for atheist scientists who think it is a great result if no one endorsing ID ever gets a tenured job in any university department anywhere, no matter how many articles he has published, no matter how many times his articles are cited, no matter how good a teacher he is, etc. All the fair-minded people have admitted that there was a prior prejudice against Gonzalez, and that in principle this prejudice could have affect the voting. The only debatable thing is not whether or not there was prejudice (there was), but whether or not the outcome would have been the same even without the prejudice. I agree that intelligent people could disagree about the latter. But only a partisan would deny the former.

93

This creates a weird situation. Is ID a religious belief or science? If it is a religious belief then why is it being forced into science classes and treated as if it is science by the Discovery Institute and others? If it is science, then why is it prejudicial to judge Gonzalez by the science he has produced?

Surely an astrophysicist would be judged poorly if he pushed Flat Earth theory, right? Is that discrimination or prejudice?

Whatever prejudice you think exists it didn’t go into the decision to deny tenure.

1 Like
94

The science Gonzalez produced was published in 68 peer-reviewed articles. It was not prejudicial to take into account the number and quality of those articles, and the number of times they were cited by scientists in the field. Nor did I ever say or imply that it was. That is not where I said the prejudice lay. I have been very specific about where the prejudice lay, but you have chosen to ignore the evidence I presented.

Note also that saying that someone was prejudiced does not imply that their decision was wrong. A juror might vote for the guilt of a man against whom he holds an ethnic or religious prejudice, yet the guilty verdict might be sound, i.e., that man might actually have committed the crime and the evidence that he did so might leave no reasonable doubt. Similarly, an atheist scientist who didn’t want an ID proponent in his department due to personal prejudice (because he hated any conclusion about nature that might even indirectly support belief in God) might vote against tenure for objective reasons. But in neither case is the prejudice justifiable, and in neither case should it go without reprimand, where it is detected. The difference between us, it seems, is that you think not only that the objective arguments against tenure were sound (which I granted they might be), but also that the prejudice was justifiable. That is where we have moral and professional differences which are not likely to be harmonized any time soon.

The Flat Earth cliche again?!?! Why can’t internet atheists come up with fresh material?

I guess the atheist Fred Hoyle was guilty of being stupid enough to believe in a flat earth, when he suggested that a superintelligence appeared to have monkeyed with the laws and constants of nature? You put those two conclusions on a par?

Name me a public, tax-funded school in the USA where ID has been “forced into science classes” – i.e., where a State education authority or local school board has insisted that its teachers include coverage of ID arguments in science class. (Dover doesn’t count, because ID was never taught in Dover science classes; its existence was merely mentioned by a school board employee.)

Discovery’s official policy before, during, and since the Dover trial has been that ID should not be mandated as part of the science curriculum. Ignorance is no excuse on this point, as this information has been made known about ten thousand times on every blogsite on the planet where these issues are debated. Why you would repeat a known falsehood is a mystery to me.

You don’t know that. You weren’t there. You don’t have an exhaustive list of the reasons why each voting member voted the way he/she did. And you can’t read the minds and souls of those people for motives that they would be embarrassed to publicly admit to. All that we know for sure is that at least one voting member confessed later that Gonzalez’s views on ID did factor into his decision. (Maybe not decisively, but it was on his mind.) If that was the case for one member who was willing to admit it, it could have been the case for others who were silent on the question. We will never know. I don’t claim to know. I don’t see how you can claim to know. The most you can say is that the President’s rehearsed, sanitized, publicity-conscious version of the complex rough and tumble of events seems convincing to you, and that’s fine, as long as you admit that you are glad that Gonzalez did not get tenure, and would be glad if no ID proponent ever got tenure anywhere, and that you think that holding an ID view is by itself enough to show that one is a poor scientist, undeserving of tenure. If you could admit to having this prejudice inside you, I could respect your disagreement more. But you are pretending to a detached objectivity that you most definitely do not possess.

95

I’ve said this already, but it bears repeating. Even if you could read the minds of those making the decision, you still could not conclude that bias didn’t play a part in their decision. Implicit bias is real, it’s demonstrable, and it affects people’s decisions without their knowledge.

5 Likes
96

I agree entirely. However, sometimes in academics one finds explicit bias. I have heard professors (in the privacy of their offices) confess to prejudices they would never admit at a departmental meeting. This can affect hiring, of course. I know of one case where a professor at University Y, who had graduated with a Ph.D. from University X and had had a bad experience there, was heard to say that he would never hire any graduate of University X. He in fact carried out this policy as long as he was able, by blocking candidates from University X from getting tenure-track jobs at his institution. Of course, he never justified his objections to any candidate so blatantly; when arguing in public, he would say that the candidate from University X had not produced “good scholarship” or the like; but in private his motivation was spiteful, to “get back” at his former professors, by hurting their proteges. It is experiences like this which removed all my dreamy-eyed ideals about the purity and nobility of university professors – and I’ve had many such experiences, and heard many others recounted by reliable sources.

97

I don’t mean to suggest that there isn’t conscious bias as well.

2 Likes
98

Are you saying that the prejudice is against his religious beliefs or the science he has done?

Members of an astrophysics department probably don’t want a Flat Earther in their department, either.

Attempts were made in Kansas to put ID into science classrooms.

“We are building on this momentum, broadening the wedge with a positive scientific alternative to materialistic scientific theories, which has come to be called the theory of intelligent design (ID). Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.”
–The Discovery Institute

Were you there? If not . . .

2 Likes
99

Very good point. DI disavowed Dover because it was a legal disaster they could see coming their way. Some YECs went rogue. Kansas, however, was entirely a DI creation. They still put it up as the good alternative to Dover. They own what happened in Kansas, even if we give them a “pass” on the Dover education board. Keep in mind, both were concurrent, so references to “Dover” refer to both the Kansas and Dover education board actions.

1 Like
100

I’m saying certain people at the university of Iowa disliked his religious beliefs – such as the atheist New Testament professor in Iowa State’s religion department who started a campaign against Gonzalez long before the vote for tenure took place, and tried to influence the tenure vote – and that at least one member of the astronomy department admitted that Gonzalez’s views (on the designed character of the earth, galaxy, etc.) as expressed in his popular book were uncongenial to him and that this affected his judgment as he pondered on whether or not to vote for tenure for Gonzalez. Those are places where religious prejudice came into the affair. There may have been other places; we can’t know, because academics who don’t want someone given tenure are generally not likely to state all their reasons, when some of those reasons might seem to be based on prejudice. The public reasons they would give would all be acceptable reasons that did not allude to anyone’s religious conclusions regarding his scientific work.

There is no parity between believing in a flat earth and finding fine-tuning arguments in cosmology/astronomy worthy of consideration. Eminent scientists like Francis Collins, John Polkinghorne, and Fred Hoyle have said they take such arguments seriously. Gonzalez never contested for a flat earth.

No, I wasn’t. So I admit that any charge that the vote was entirely governed by religious prejudice would go beyond the evidence that I have, or that anyone has who hasn’t had intimate conversations with the voting members of the department. But there is definitely evidence that Gonzalez’s ideas on design, and on the relation between science and theology, were in the minds of some of the faculty at Iowa State; it was not only his publications, number of graduate students, amount of telescope time, etc., that were in the mind of those voting. One can hold that in the end the decision was based only on objective criteria, but one can’t argue that there was nothing subjective agitating the mind of those who had votes in the department. If you could admit that at least some people at Iowa State had a strong personal disinclination to hire Gonzalez based on his ideas on God and design, then, even if you maintain that in the end they rose above themselves and voted only on objective criteria, we could end this long discussion with an agreement on that one point.

You quote from a document that (a) was an internal discussion paper, not formal institutional policy; (b) is much older than the many, many public statements of policy issued by Discovery before, during, and after the Dover trial. You are cherry-picking an older document, and the only document you can find to back your conclusion, and ignoring all the newer official documents which don’t back your conclusion. Why are you ignoring the many newer statements issued under the seal of the Discovery Institute? Are you saying all those newer statements are lies and deceptions? That when they say they do not want ID forced into science classes, they really mean that they do in fact want ID forced into science classes? If you are making that claim, you will need far more evidence than an ancient internal discussion paper.

I have not studied the Kansas case in detail. But note that the newspaper article you quote says:

“The Kansas Board of Education voted Tuesday that students will be expected to study doubts about modern Darwinian theory,”

“Expected to study doubts about modern Darwinian theory” does not equal “expected to study ID”. I have not yet seen any proposed state or local legislation that makes the study of ID writings or arguments (as found in Behe, Meyer, Dembski, etc.) a mandatory part of the curriculum.

Many biologists have criticized classical neo-Darwinian theory, without being ID proponents: Stuart Newman, James Shapiro, etc. There is no reason to take the quoted words as indicating mandatory teaching of ID theory in the classroom. Besides, this is a journalistic account. Do you have any actual documents of State or school board policy specifically mandating the teaching of ID in the classroom? There may be such documents, but I have never seen any of them produced in these debates. All I have ever heard is charges without documentation. Where are the documents that say: “ID must be taught in ninth-grade biology class?”

101

Just so we are clear, are you saying that Intelligent Design is a religious belief?

If I understand Gonzalez’s argument correctly, he is saying that the Earth did not come about through natural processes but instead had to be designed by some intelligent designer. Am I reading this wrong?

With any group of human beings there are going to be subjective opinions about other members of the group, both good and bad. That’s just how humans operate. The real question is if scientists look past their personal inclinations and give other scientists a fair shake. From everything I have read, Gonzalez was given a fair shake. The president of the university even reviewed the findings of the tenure board and agreed with their findings. If Gonzalez was not involved in ID his denial of tenure would have been a non-story, just as the 3 previous denials of tenure out of the last 12 applicants were non-stories.

The problem is that the “doubts” are bovine excrement invented by the Discovery Institute and other ID groups.

1 Like