Behe is an embarrassment to Lehigh University’s reputation. I am certain that the Administration is doing everything possible to see Behe retire or leave Lehigh University. Look at the website. I am certain that he will be retiring soon or be given the title of Professor emeritus with an office in the basement somewhere and no teaching/research assignments.
It heavily depends on the university. If they are a research focused department looking to hire active researchers then a candidate for tenure would need to show an ability to get grants, and preferably already have active research grants. They would also need to show that they have been producing publications on work that was done at that university.
If it is an undergrad teaching university, then the requirements are very different.
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I guess not, huh.
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I agree with this part of your answer.
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Based on these comments, I think I can safely say that you would agree with when I conjecture that if Behe had published Darwin’s Black Box before his department voted on his tenure, and they knew its contents, he would have been denied tenure. Correct?
Yes, I know, and I already built this into my example, so that my hypothetical department could not use the Gonzalez justifications. But given even a squeaky-clean research record, I still suspect that a number of members of any biology department in a research university would not want an ID proponent as a colleague, and would vote against tenure. I know you said that you personally would not vote against tenure, and I believe you, but I don’t think that is a typical attitude among the biologists I have read who have expressed opinions on origins questions. But possibly the biologists who are loudest on the internet aren’t typical of other biologists.
I suspect that many would not want a colleague that is a proponent of ID, but I think the vast majority of scientists would look past it as long as it didn’t affect the candidate’s scientific output.
Let’s look at this from a different point of view. Let’s say the CDC was looking for someone to fill an important scientific position, and it came out that the candidate was an anti-vaxxer. Would the CDC be within their rights to not select that candidate? Why isn’t it valid to judge the worth of a scientist based on their views as it relates the scientific field in which they work?
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And that’s all I’m asking for.
Regarding you question and comparison:
I haven’t studied the anti-vaccination movement, and I don’t know much about the science (if any) that justifies it. But I gather that for any biologist working in the field of disease, immunization, etc., acceptance of the main outlines of the germ theory of disease, etc. would be necessary. If the anti-vax person denies that diseases are caused by microbes, then I would think he would be so far out of the mainstream that he could not do useful scientific work in the area. (Maybe in some other area of biology, but not that one.) But then, someone who held that view would probably have produced papers denying the germ theory of disease, and those papers would be part of his application for tenure, and I think it would be fair to deny tenure if the papers were lousy. (Not because they disagreed with the majority view, but because they were lousy.)
I don’t think the case is going to be the same for an ID person such as I envisioned in my hypothetical example. The ID person’s specialty might be, say, knockout experiments, where the effects of removing certain genes upon the organism is explored. If the ID person produced an adequate number of research articles in this area, and they were all judged to be of high quality, adding to our stock of knowledge about the relationship between genes and phenotypical expression, then I don’t think it should be held against the ID person that he had somewhere published his personal intellectual conclusion that the whole DNA-protein system was intelligently designed. That belief, whether right or wrong, would not prevent the ID person from producing a lifetime’s worth of knockout experiments that made a real contribution to knowledge. Such knowledge would be objective knowledge, testable and confirmable by researchers in other labs around the world, and so it would be knowledge that all scientists could accept, whether they were ID proponents or not. In such a case, to deny the person tenure, even if some other departmental members would be embarrassed to have an ID proponent on faculty, would in my view be wrong. It would, in effect, be saying: “Even though all your science in the area of research for which you were hired is methodologically sound and we fully accept the results, you draw conclusions (not in your articles about your experiments, and not in your classroom teaching, but elsewhere) about the nature of life and its origin that we find repugnant, and we are going to punish you for that by denying you a scientific career.”
I think that this is wrong, just on general principles of fairness and consistency; and further, from a public relations point of view, if the public thinks that such things happen, it will only lead to further public distrust of science and its practitioners. The public (or a very large portion of it) would regard such a decision as a strong-arm enforcement of conformity of thought and an attack on the idea of a university as a place of great intellectual diversity. It would lead to further charges from fundamentalists and others that scientists are denying jobs to perfectly good colleagues out of a hidden commitment to materialism and atheism. It would fuel the fire of the culture wars. The best thing that biologists could do in such a case would be to give the ID proponent tenure (given that the quality was there, as in my hypothetical case it is); it would make them look much better in the public eye. They might think it would make them look better within their professional world to keep any ID proponent out of work in their department, and maybe it would, but the culture-war cost of the decision would be high in the long run.
I don’t think Darwin’s Black Box was a major problem for Lehigh University. It did give Behe some notoriety and it wasn’t damaging to Lehigh University much at all to have denied tenure to Behe. The real damage came with Behe’s absolutely horrendous testimony in the Dover trial. Behe’s testimony killed ID and Behe’s reputation and with it tarnished Lehigh University.
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I’m a little confused about the chronology implied in you remarks.
Behe had tenure at Lehigh before Darwin’s Black Box was published. So they couldn’t have fired him for publishing that book, even if they wanted to. What I was asking was whether you thought they would have denied him tenure if Darwin’s Black Box had come out before they made the decision.
Before you answer, keep in mind that long before the Dover Trial, Darwin’s Black Box drew many hostile reviews. There were criticisms of Paul Gross and Jerry Coyne and Ken Miller and many others. (Also from Allen Orr, though Orr’s critical remarks were phrased in a more gentle and scholarly manner.) The faculty at Lehigh would have known of those reviews. Given that, I think there would have been a strong temptation for them to deny Behe tenure, if the tenure decision had post-dated the book and the hostile reviews. I think Behe chose wisely to wait until he had tenure before airing his thoughts on ID. And he always advises young people (I think Joshua will confirm this, because he had contact with Behe earlier in his life) not to let their ID sympathies be known until they have tenure. He wouldn’t be giving advice like that unless he thought the prejudice in the academic scientific world was real, and serious.
Some people here are assuring us that most biologists are very fair-minded and that if an otherwise qualified applicant endorsed ID, he would still get tenure. I don’t think that is Mike Behe’s perception of the reality in life science departments, and he is in somewhat of a position to know something about them.
I was trying to answer your hypothetical question. I know the timeline quite well. I don’t think Darwin’s Black Box notoriety was Behe’s Waterloo. But certainly the Dover trial was.
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So your answer is that they wouldn’t have denied him tenure, even if they could have, after Darwin’s Black Box, but if he hadn’t had tenure by the time of the Dover Trial, they would have denied him tenure then?
I am sure that if Behe didn’t have tenure when Lehigh’s reputation was being to be tarnished, I am sure the Administration would have put pressure on the Biological Sciences Department to get rid of him. With Behe having tenure it is much harder (legally and monetarily) to get rid of him although not impossible. I am sure that right now, Behe is in negotiations of a “retirement package”. In the end, it is all about the dollars. The university will make it as miserable as possible for Behe to continue while at the same time sweating the deal for him to leave.
Since Behe is 67 years old, and thus at an age when many Americans are thinking about retirement anyway, there is no need to fictionalize any effort on Lehigh’s part to induce him to retire. And if it’s the high salaries of full professors that concern them, then they would be trying to induce not only Behe but all senior professors to retire, and that would have nothing to do with ID or the Dover trial. So Behe and Lehigh may well be talking about a retirement package, but that is very normal between organizations and high-paid senior employees, and it is unlikely that it has anything much to do with ID.
Anyhow, in a roundabout way, you have answered my question: you think there are forces at Lehigh, animated largely by his role in the Dover trial, that would like to get rid of him. And you think that if such forces had the power to do so, they would, and that if he had given his testimony at the Dover trail before being awarded tenure, he would not have his job at Lehigh now. Got it.
I am sure that within the Administration of Lehigh up to including the university President, discussions of how to “handle” Behe has been “under discussion” for more than a decade. Realize that at the university level, it is all about the money. There is a possibility that Behe’s Catholic ID brings in money to the university. There are a lot of well off Catholic alumni in the PA, NJ, NY area that see Behe as anti-Ken Ham and anti-YEC Evangelical Christians. Behe is not very far off from Catholic view of evolution and cosmology. It is a possibility that must be considered.
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If a scientist had been vocal about their anti-vaccine position, that would probably be enough to deny them the job, and rightly so. If someone demonstrates bad judgement when it comes to science then that should be considered as part of their application.
Scientists aren’t big fans of post-modernism. If you back what they see as bad science, then you are judged as being a bad scientist. Quite frankly, that’s the way it should be. The way forward is to admit the hypothetical nature of ID, and not take a strong stance on it. It could also be framed as a personal religious belief, or a metaphysical stance a la Denton.