Today’s Muncie Star-Press has reprinted the letter from President Gora of Ball State University (see just below), and adds this statement:
BSU spokeswoman Joan Todd told The Star Press this afternoon that the university is limited in what it can say because the review of the course is “a personnel matter.”
Todd issued this statement: “Terry King and professor Hedin have both reviewed the panel’s findings and are working together to ensure that course content is aligned with the curriculum and best standards of the discipline. The university is particularly appreciative for Dr. Hedin’s active participation and cooperation during this process. His academic credentials are an asset to the university. He remains an important and valued member of our physics and astronomy department.”
This means two things. First, the committee report on Hedin’s course was undoubtedly negative—in the sense of finding it insupportable as a science course and, probably, as a religion-and-philosophy course. That can be divined from both this statement and Gora’s statement that any teaching of religion has to present a variety of viewpoints. That means that Hedin simply can’t reconfigure “The boundaries of science” class as a religion/philosophy course. It’s simply too Christian, and lacks any alternative nonreligious views.
Second, Hedin will have to reconfigure his class, if he continues to teach it, as a pure science class. Or, if he moves it to another department (something I see as unlikely), he can no longer favor any particular religious view, or even the privileging of religion over nonbelief.
Hedin is given plaudits for his contributions to BSU, and I have no beef with that. I never wanted him to be fired or reprimanded. What I wanted was for this course to be stopped as a science course, and for the religious proselytizing to cease. That will apparently happen, so I wish Dr. Hedin the best. And the message is clear to the new ID-friendly hire, Guillermo Gonzalez. No teaching of ID (he’s already agreed to that) and, if he wants tenure, he’d better do research on real science and not ID. That’s clear from Gora’s statement that ID is not science.
This outcome is precisely what most of us wanted, of course, except for those miscreants who include the Discovery Institute and two unnamed bloggers, all of whom think that Hedin should have been able to teach what he wanted sans outside interference.
Awesome. It was nice to read that Gora also mentioned that as a state school they need to abide by the roolz: “As a public university, we have a constitutional obligation to maintain a clear separation between church and state” as that seemed to be a hotly debated issue here.
This is, of course, secondary to the issue of academic integrity. Even if we had no First Amendment, this class should not exist.
Yes but there was a lot of discussion about whether a university had to abide by the same rules as a high school does and it seems Gora feels that is the case.
“whether a university had to abide …”
She probable thinks she had to ethically, not necessarily legally.
Oh no, I think she was quite clear that it was a legal obligation when she says, “As a public university, we have a constitutional obligation to maintain a clear separation between church and state.”
Absolutely!
I would feel more confident if I heard this from someone with expertise in First Amendment issues.
Don’t you think she had legal advice from university attorneys?
Woo-hoo! It’s always good to see reason prevail.
Thanks, Jerry, for all you’ve done to help make the world a better place by improving education in Indiana.
b&
*upvote*
+1
Now, on to Texas!
I hope they also intelligently redesign the Physics department version of the course “The Universe and You” which had the same “Boundaries of Science” title on the syllabus. I think Gora addressed that directly when she said “ach professor has the responsibility to assign course materials and teach content in a manner consistent with the course description, curriculum, and relevant discipline.”
As a non-scientist, the sneaky bait-and-switch that Hedin pulled was as offensive to me as the ID itself. I can’t imagine showing up for a course and finding out that it’s completely different from what you expected. I’ve had courses that were terrible due to professorial incompetence (including alcoholism!) or self-indulgence, but never one that covered a completely different topic!
Yes. Compare the proposal Hedin wrote for the course to the actual syllabus and reading list he gave the students. An egregious example of bait-and-switch. Intellectual dishonesty is the bread and butter of the Discovery Institute, but should not be found at an academic institution. It seems to me Hedin should have to answer for this.
You can make that expression much, much stronger:
Intellectual dishonesty is the bread and butter of the Discovery Institute and in general all creationists.
I once signed up for a class called “Early German Language and Literature” that ended up being about King Arthur.
Ha ha I hope you at least read the Morte D’Arthur in Middle English because at least that is closer to German. Maybe they were thinking, “hey, English is a Germanic language….”
Heh. I read Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur in high school. I foolishly decided I wanted to read it for a major report that was worth about 1/3 of your grade for the course, even though it wasn’t on the list, and convinced my British Literature teacher to let me. The library didn’t have it, but kindly acquired it at my request.
It was an interesting story and I didn’t really regret it, I managed an A in the class, but it sure was a lot of extra work learning to understand the language. And, though it is interesting, being a product of its time it is also very formulaic and repetitive.
Everything ended badly too. Nunneries and monasteries. Everyone was guilty.
I did worse in high school. I read Dostoyevsky by choice and independently!
Surely for a secular atheist that should be “inferred”.
If one of those unnamed bloggers is PZ Myers, I think that misrepresents his position. As he said:
A bad course is an ethical problem, not a legal one. It’s also an issue that the university has to handle internally.
And that is exactly what happened — no legal action was taken, but the pressure forced the university to use its own internal mechanisms to handle the matter.
I don’t know that a legal case would have actually triumphed, so I’m delighted that Ball State caved and took matters into their own hands.
“Divine” is fine for secular atheists, but maybe not for philosophical naturalists!
/@
E.g., Gora’s letter was simply divine.
+ 1 😀
How is Jerry’s statement misrepresenting Myers? Myers says of Hedin’s course: “academic freedom is the issue here, and professors have to have the right to teach unpopular, controversial issues, even from an ignorant perspective.”
Saying it’s “an ethical problem” just means Myers thinks Hedin is behaving unethically, not that he doesn’t have the right to teach his class.
Here is more context from Myers’ post:
PZ didn’t object to the university doing something about Hedin — what he objected to was seeing this as a legal issue, and to be precise, the legal issue has not actually be resolved, just avoided.
So I do think it is a mischaracterization to suggest that PZ didn’t want this outcome. Given his writing, this seems to be exactly the outcome he wanted, which was to have Hedin dealt with internally by the university, and not fought in the courts.
If I understand Gora’s letter correctly, the way the university has “dealt with” Hedin is to instruct him to stop teaching ID in his science class. That doesn’t seem consistent with Myers’ position that “professors have to have the right to teach unpopular, controversial issues, even from an ignorant perspective,” which Jerry accurately paraphrased as “Hedin should have been able to teach what he wanted.”
Agreed.
You may be correct, and I may be giving PZ too much credit. I saw PZ’s concerns as largely objecting to the notion that the State has the legal power to say what a university professor teaches, so this resolution avoided that issue. I’m sure that he’ll write on these recent events, and we’ll have a better sense of whether he didn’t want this outcome.
I think Jerry’s referring to:
1) PZ’s and Larry’s opinion that the case should not be resolved using lawyers (but really this was resolved this way because it was only the FFRF’s letter that prompted the university to react).
2) That academic freedom pretty much = anything goes in the classroom which Gora has explicit said it does not.
Professors (more generally, faculty) don’t have a right to teach from a position of ignorance. They’re expected to have attained a reasonable level of expertise before they are offered the job.
True, there are lots of high schools where important science courses are taught by coaches, but that just demonstrates the undue importance many communities place on high school athletics and how little they value real education.
I still wonder who okayed Hedin’s hiring in the first place. Did he conceal his creationist beliefs from the selection committee?
Not likely, since they hired him out of an Evangelical Christian college.
… which he had left to go on a church-planting mission!
Subscribe.
And the message is clear to the new ID-friendly hire, Guillermo Gonzalez. No teaching of ID (he’s already agreed to that)
Yes he did, but someone ought to keep an eye out that he doesn’t try to teach “strengths and weaknesses” or some other euphemism.
Robertson is already listed as “chairman emeritus” on the Ball State web site; the new chair is Thomas Jordan.
Maybe some brave students, armed with this letter from Gora, will challenge him if he breaks his promise.
If they’re aware of it. They’re off-campus now, and they probably don’t pay attention to stuff like this anyway. That’s why nothing happened for years until Jerry took up the cause.
He’d be really crazy if he did, given that he’s lucky to have this job (which we only know because he was so vociferous about how often he was not hired and how many places he applied to).
Yeah, the poor persecuted
Christianscientist with unpopular ideas.This outcome is precisely what most of us wanted
Yep! Looks like a good result for just about everyone. It strengthens the department and gives the students a better education.
Congratulations Dr.Coyne on a successful conclusion to all your efforts !
I think we all know who the two unnamed bloggers are and “miscreants” is a stronger word than I would have expected as a descriptor. I can’t say I disagree with it, though. Especially when one of the two keeps insisting that it was not just wrong to threaten legal action, but that the basis in law for the legal action (establishment clause of first amendment) is misguided and should be abandoned – because it’s very old and “not working out for ya.” I think this is more evidence that it generally works just fine, thanks.
Oh, burn!
It cracks me up everytime you do that. That, accompanied with a stroking of the chin, was a popular taunt when I lived in Germany in the mid ’70s. Brings back memories and puts a smile on my face.
sub
Bravo, Prof. Coyne, and the same to the FFRF and all the others who brought this farce to its apt conclusion.
Seems a bit premature to call it the “conclusion.” I think the title of the OP was correct in that it says this “hints at what will happen.” That’s all it does, is hint. It will be interesting to see what the course content looks like after Hedin ensures that the content aligns with the best standards of the discipline. Will he really torch the entire reading list? I wonder if he can teach an accurate course.
I have the same doubt. I don’t see how someone who seriously considers creationist ideas respectable can be expected to teach much of anything that requires critical thought. He’s already demonstrated a profound inability to understand the central organizing concepts in Biology and really, it isn’t that tough to grasp. I don’t think I’d expect him to teach anything related to science very well.
And again, the incredible dishonesty of presenting a syllabus and reading list so profoundly different from the course proposal he submitted. That seems to me to be a serious ethical transgression.
Biology isn’t even supposed to be covered in the course! The course is about the physical sciences, and he should have been covering principles of physics and how they relate to society. Physics isn’t as socially relevant as biology but he could do better than intelligent design. The physics of auto accidents, for example.
Perhaps we need separate terms for biological creationism vs. universe creationism. Of course both beliefs are always held in tandem, but it might put a bit more heat on physics departments to speak out…
You’re right of course. What Jerry concluded “That’s clear from Gora’s statement that ID is not science. ” is good enough for me as a big win.
As much as I dislike the idea of ID being even taught at all, if it is to be taught you can do so in history of science, sociology of science, or even (though its a stretch) sociology of science. But since no recognized body of scientists recognizes it as science, it just can’t be taught in a science class. Period. How could the Discovery Institute really object??
Sorry, that last was meant to be philosophy of science, not a second repetition of sociology.
That’s not how I see it. This is NewSpeak for “we’re keeping Hedin and probably not going to do anything significant about what he teaches other than to ask him to please hide god a little better so that it’s less likely that someone will complain.”
This letter should be send to the Texas State Board of Education and to the biology textbooks publishers. Perhaps some of the latter will choose integrity over ‘mercantile freedom’. Concerning the former, it will give an argument to the few boarders that may be defending evolution.
Desnes Diev
They didn’t fire Hedin, but I would think it will not look good to his tenure committee that he saw fit to teach material that has been declared not to meet the standards of academic integrity.