Astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, a vocal proponent of the theory of intelligent design, was recently denied tenure by Iowa State University, according to an article in The Chronicle. Gonzalez has appealed the decision with Iowa State president Gregory L. Geoffroy, who has until June 6 to respond.
Gonzalez believes it was a clear-cut case of discrimination:
“I’m concerned that my views on intelligent design have been a factor,” he told Chronicle reporter Richard Monastersky.
Gonzalez is co-author of the controversial book, The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery (Regnery Publishing Inc., 2004), which claims that the universe and life on earth is the product of an intelligent designer, a concept rejected by much of the scientific community.
The book’s publication prompted 120 Iowa State faculty members to issue a statement denouncing intelligent design as contrary to science.
Monastersky notes that Gonzalez has a stronger publication record than most of the astronomy faculty, but also that he did his best work while he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin and at the University of Washington, where he earned his Ph.D.
According to university spokesman John McCarroll, that may have been the problem: “Tenure review only deals with his work since he came to Iowa State.”
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26 Responses to Intelligent Design vs. Tenure?
kathden - July 11, 2011 at 8:00 am
I’ve been reading this article to my wife. She noticed a very obvious thing: there’s no need for business programs since the ideas are so simple and readily available online (as for instance in this article).
But Christensen has still managed to make a career of limitless variations on an idea. His simplified university (with Christensen studies as one of the four majors) might well attract a lot of tuition-paying students. Go figure….
jwr12 - July 11, 2011 at 8:12 am
Based on published studies, as opposed to self-congratulating seminars of cherry-picked capitalists conducted at Cambridge, private schools do an equally bad if not worse job of creating huge student debts and wasted credits without any valuable credential. Disruptor, disrupt thyself! Many of these ideas are also antithetical to the commitment most academics have to decentralized, diverse communities of knowledge. For example, yes, a single course on Western Civ generated at Harvard and sold by a vendor might score well on student ratings and would certainly drive down costs if taught in every school across the USA. It’s a model that works well for television sit coms, I believe. What it doesn’t do is create a flourishing academic realm that actually can produce more knowledge and convince students not at the Ivy mothership that they can do the same. So I think that instead of getting self-congratulatory about how they are the future, private conventions ought to consider how they will help preserve the best of what is, while also taking advantage of technology. I think that they will find many interlocutors in Academe, if they are willing (and here’s one little thing that should be mentioned) to see this not as a profit-center, but as a public good organized on principles which are not solely those of the market.
socafish - July 11, 2011 at 9:09 am
“Figuring out a way to put those credits toward a credential could help greatly in college-completion goals.”
Yes, but does nothing more towards creating an educated population. A BS in English with 12 “extra” hours in business knows more than student without those hours. The “piece of paper”, in and of itself, is arbitrarily and meaningless.
College completion rates (like university ratings) are for state legislators to wave around as they beg corporations to build another factory in their state (paraphrased from a previous poster).
dale1 - July 11, 2011 at 10:00 am
You’re right, socafish — my state is constantly trying to up the graduation rate and produce more warm bodies with papers that indicate that they are “educated.” What we get are Frankenstein’s monster of degree programs, with bits and pieces welded onto a rickety frame.
Sadly, we cannot count on the bachelor’s degree to mean anything in particular anymore. The faculty at many research universities have, in my opinion, abdicated responsibility for the core curriculum and what a student ought to know and be able to do upon degree completion. Certain institutions are trying to modernize this idea of a core set of knowledge by instituting principles of undergraduate learning (i.e. IUPUI), but with mixed success. I would add that the mixed success comes, again in my opinion, directly from the lack of commitment and engagement of the tenure-stream faculty.
Dr_Zachary_Smith - July 11, 2011 at 11:35 am
Some questions:
1) What do you mean by an “educated population”? What does it mean to be “educated”?
2) If the “piece of paper” is arbitrary and meaningless, what makes completion of any hours different? How do we demonstrate that difference–if it indeed exists–to those who pay us for our work?
And, possibly, college completion might actually mean something to our students. Perhaps a sense that we care about them, that we acknowledge that they know things before they come to us, and that we care about helping them complete their educational goals are all important to them.
We often behave as if those things are not important to us.
robert_wyatt - July 11, 2011 at 11:45 am
The degree is like a check, its value comes only from what it represents not the value of the paper itself. Complaining about ”extra “credits without credentials is devaluing learning and emphasizing the value of the credential.
If a student stops 1 credit short (let’s say bowling) of a degree are they any different than a student with the degree?
Dr_Zachary_Smith - July 11, 2011 at 12:26 pm
“are they any different than a student with the degree?”
Yes: one has a degree, the other doesn’t. Credentialing is important, and even academics recognize it; try to get into a graduate school without that degree.
If you mean, in the Grand Scheme of Things, is there any difference between the students, the answer is: perhaps, perhaps not. I have the same degree as many of the people I went to graduate school with. Some are much better scholars than I, some far worse. If a degree is worth only credentialing as it is constructed, then I suggest that it needs to be re-examined.
Ralf Ritter 李祖良 - July 11, 2011 at 4:19 pm
The President and Dean of Golden Gate University have recently published a book which offers a perspective on how Colleges might innovate. The authors advocate a 3 year BA program using a hybrid model of in-person and online instruction:Riptide: The New Normal for Higher EducationDan Angel, Terry Connelly
mkt42 - July 11, 2011 at 4:57 pm
“One shocking number thrown around at the meeting last week was that 40
percent of all credits earned have not been applied to a degree or a
credential”
I see at least two problems with that sentence. Isn’t the overall graduation rate about 60% or less? So right off the bat, we’d expect at least 40% of credits to not be applied to a degree.
And “excess” credits are not necessarily a bad thing. I took more classes, and was granted more credits, than I needed to graduate. But that was because I was interested in the material!
bscmath78 - July 11, 2011 at 6:31 pm
The article tells us:
“…in the early days of the personal computer, the entire machine was proprietary.”
What an incredible misstatement of business and computer history!
Did no one remember that the Apple I was famously created in a garage? Released in 1976? Did no one remember it was created by two guys without any of their own factories? They built their machine from parts they bought. The CPU was the MOS 6502. In 1977, they came out with the Apple II also using the MOS 6502 chip and Mostek MK4096 4K DRAM memory chips.
Also in 1977, the Commodore PET also ran on the MOS 6502 chip. Commodore bought MOS in 1976 when MOS ran into financial difficulties.
Also in 1977, the Tandy TRS-80 ran on the Zilog Z80 chip.
In 1979, the Atari 400 ran on the MOS 6502B chip.
Earlier, the 1975, Altair 8800, was based on the Intel 8080 chip.
Even earlier, the 1974, Mark-8 kit (designed by a grad student), was based on the Intel 8008 chip.
Here is a table of some home computers with a column listing the processor chip used:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_home_computers_by_category#Manufacturers_and_models
Did no one remember the whole famous story of how an array of cheap, powerful, OEM microchips in constant competition drove the reality of Moore’s Law and revolutionized technology?
“Then IBM realized they could build a better and cheaper machine by getting the parts from
others.”
No, IBM realized that the micro market was getting big enough to target and its traditional development process was too slow and expensive, it would fail again (I guess no mention of the IBM Future Systems (FS) fiasco), so they needed to copy the techniques of their small competitors. So in 1980, Don Estridge got the mission and the mandate to do things completely the non-IBM way, in order to get to market very quickly with a price competitive product. The PC (IBM 5150) came out in 1981. There then followed a whole sequence of self-inflicted wounds that helped bring IBM to its knees while enriching Intel, Microsoft and others. There have been quite a number of books about this well-known story, did no one remember them?
Now it is true that back in 1975, IBM had come out with the IBM 5100 Portable Computer and then in 1978 the IBM 5110 Portable Computer, both based on IBM proprietary hardware. Even though they ran the non-proprietary BASIC and APL languages, they managed to be unsuccessful. It probably took these two failures to help convince IBM management to follow the rest of the industry’s lead and give up its proprietary hardware habits, despite the risks to the rest of its business.
At an earlier time, it had been difficult for Watson Jr. to get IBM to take transistors (a Bell Labs invention) seriously. And earlier, IBM was slow to act on electronic computers, letting Univac take the lead. IBM had almost a tradition of being slow to implement new technology, letting others develop the market before entering.
You have to wonder when such well-known events are not remembered.
Jesse Rodgers - July 12, 2011 at 8:54 am
I would like to think that the program that started the “dormcubator” trend that seems to be gaining traction is an example of disruptive experiments in the higher ed. With VeloCity (http://velocity.uwaterloo.ca) we don’t have courses or instructors. Instead we organize peer based mentorship opportunities and offer a really early stage incubator for our students to work on their ideas. We continue a supportive relationship with them whether drop out of school to pursue their startup (like with Kik) or take a year off to focus on their opportunity.
None of this is tied to the traditional academics and we don’t care what program students come from. Students don’t pay to be a part of VeloCity but they do need to apply. We are able to deliver this program a relative low cost (less than $100 per student) but we are increasing what we spend in key areas as we learn where we can have a higher impact.
drdwilliams - July 12, 2011 at 9:08 am
Alas a symptom of the low regard in which the humanities are held. Business is god and history is discarded as irrelevant. This piece demonstrates that in the absence of accurate historical accounting, fallacious arguments are more easily made. The robust and resilient community of knowledge declines, the body of knowledge decays and demagoguery reigns.
Mark Rocha - July 12, 2011 at 9:24 am
Community colleges like Pasadena City College are the original disruptors: Quality higher education courses transferable everywhere for $36 per unit. The challenge is that last Fall we had 8,000 more students apply than we had room for. This Fall the demand will be still higher. This community college, founded in 1924, is not a business in a “market” but an American invention of social justice. Is our response to globalism in an information age the abandonment of the principle of universal access to higher education? Perhaps so, but we ought to be clear that this is what we are doing. Pasadena City College and all community colleges are not businesses but Internet-style utilities. Give it away free and watch what happens: a world remade. It’s what Truman, Eisenhower and Clark Kerr knew.
paulkurucz - July 12, 2011 at 11:21 am
The hard part will be to balance the changes coming in the next decade against principles of learning and the overall purpose of a higher education institution. In other words, can institutions evolve gracefully into a new modus operandi while staying true to their mission?
Never an easy task.
Those institutions that take the opportunity now to embrace the changing landscape will transition far more peacefully than those that don’t. Timeless principles come into play here that will be quoted in retrospect:
- visionary leadership.
- transparency
- continuous open communication among and between all employees of an institution, students, alumni, and other stakeholders.
- the release of individual interests in exchange for the benefit of the institution as a whole.
- engagement in, and commitment to, the process of change and to the institution as a whole.
And all these principles start with each individual taking personal responsibility for embracing and supporting them. Today, right now.
The alternative? Well, many institutions will not evolve gracefully over the next decade.
I hope they quickly learn a simple truth about resisting change: Suffering *is* optional…
11122741 - July 12, 2011 at 2:11 pm
again more of seeing education as consumption (of hamburgers from unchanging cows grown annually the same way) rather than the production and learning to produce …real education is not a commodity which is where Christensen and the biz people are way off the mark. They should confine their remarks to education as hamburgers.
Guest - July 12, 2011 at 3:14 pm
CHARGE LOWER TUITION!
Dr. Horo - July 12, 2011 at 6:09 pm
Business students are going to need access to computer labs and software and teachers to train them.
Tommy Bech - July 13, 2011 at 8:12 am
Computer based universityes like “the university of newcastle” and in the norwegian defence is the future. Class based education is something to give supplements to communication, but you can make an excellent MBA degree og economics degreee without going to one lecture.
rvandeza - July 13, 2011 at 11:12 am
There was nothing mentioned about the increasing costs of university administration. There have a few articles in the Chronicle about this topic. It appears that this is a large part of the problem of rising costs. Our university president was just granted a 25% bonus from the Board of Trustees, over a $100,000 bonus. The universities are pushing out the purpose of academia and replacing it with managers.
knowledgenotebook - July 13, 2011 at 5:04 pm
Christensen is a genius. He’s able to see through messy educational system with clarity, not many educators possess this capability.
And in terms of learning, how many students and educators are able to crystallize it into three categories and their respective learning function:
1. Facts / key events (rote memorization)
2. Critical Concepts (comprehension) // complex reasoning at graduate and PhD level…
3. Thorem, equations, formulas etc. hard science (RM, C and tons of Practice)
James Allworth - July 15, 2011 at 11:42 am
You’ve mischaracterized what Clay says. He’s not advocating everyone being like Harvard, or that private is any better than public:
http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/06/17/christensen.colleges/index.html
And as for a flourishing academic realm, that’s great – we all benefit from the public good. But why are students – the ones who really are least able to pay – being forced to subsidize the rest of us for the benefits that we derive from your academic realm? This isn’t about profits, it’s about making education affordable for them. Research and teaching are separate and distinct.
The basis of disruption is not preserving the best of what is, it’s about replacing it with something as good or almost as good but doing so at a fraction of the cost… and if that does happen, learning is going to be opened up to a lot more people than relative lucky few that can attend college right now.
The irony of all this is that regardless of what you say, this is going to happen. It’s already starting to – the old world institutions are going to fall and they’re going to be replaced.
_donbonomini - July 16, 2011 at 4:30 am
Is not a university is a social problem!
Chuck O'Connor - August 28, 2011 at 7:45 am
Interesting additional commentary on the new book “The Innovative University.”
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austinbarry - September 8, 2011 at 10:21 pm
One other historical fact. IBM got royalties from every punched card. Thus electronic computers and particularly magnetic tape (used by the Univac to store records, as opposed to boxes and boxes of punched cards) were a threat to their core business, since they cut down on the number of punched cards used.
austinbarry - September 8, 2011 at 10:38 pm
Perhaps the solution is to provide more granular credentialing. For example, allowing a BA/BS student to retroactively add a minor (or major) to their degree after completing all the additional requirements of the minor/major.