A few days ago I criticized the Muncie Star-Press for leaving out the Eric-Hedin/Intelligent Design (ID) flap as one of their top ten stories of the year. They considered the opening of a few new stores in the town as more newsworthy!
Now, in the unfortunately titled “Gora’s ‘gag order’ a top story of 2013” by Seth Slabaugh, the newspaper corrects that. But really, Star-Press, was Ball State University (BSU) President Jo Ann Gora’s statement about not allowing ID taught in science classes a “gag order”? That language comes straight from the Discovery Institute, not objective journalism. “Gora’s ban on teaching creationism a top story of 2013” would have been more appropriate.
But there’s a more interesting part of Slabaugh’s article: an intimation that BSU’s recent hiring of ID advocate Guillermo Gonzalez may have involved someone in the university who likes intelligent design, as well perhaps a bit of duplicity in the hiring process.
I will simply reproduce Slabaugh’s report of what another astronomer told him:
Meanwhile, Michael J. I. Brown, an observational astronomer at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, has alleged to The Star Press that BSU’s hiring last summer of Guillermo Gonzalez as an assistant professor in the department of physics and astronomy appears to have been “rigged.”
Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, in 2004 published a book, “The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery,” that prompted more than 120 of his then-fellow faculty at Iowa State University to issue a statement condemning intelligent design as contrary to science. In 2008, Gonzalez was denied tenure at Iowa State, essentially a form of termination. [JAC: Gonzalez appealed his tenure denial, but was overruled by the Iowa Board of Regents, and sources cited in his Wikipedia article suggest that Gonzalez was denied tenure not for his advocacy of ID but for his lack of scholarship, students, and his poor funding. Gonzalez still claims that his denial of tenure was based on ideological bias.]
He taught at Grove City College, a Christian liberal arts school in Pennsylvania, before being hired by Ball State. [JAC: the Grove City job was untenured.]
Brown told The Star Press: “The number of astronomers who believe in ID/creationism is tiny, so it is unlikely that two ID-believing astronomers (Gonzalez and Hedin) would end up at the same university by random chance. It flags a potentially biased job search. It would be equally unlikely … if two astronomers who owned chimpanzees ended up in the same modestly sized astrophysics group.”
The timing of the hiring is also odd, and the university admitted (see below) that Gonzalez was given advance notice of the job before other candidates heard about it. In fact, he applied for the job before it was even advertised. That’s a sign that the University (or rather, the Department of Physics and Astronomy) wanted him. It’s also strange because the job ad itself that specifies what materials you are supposed to submit, so Gonzalez must have also seen the ad before it was published. And, of course, there are lots of good physicists who haven’t been denied tenure who are looking for jobs. Was BSU aware of all the interested candidates? I doubt it.
I’ve bolded the interesting parts of the next bit:
Brown questioned whether Gonzalez had become aware of the position before it was advertised, and Brown also raised questions about how the position was advertised.
“An obvious concern is Gonzalez was aware of the job prior to it being advertised, Gonzalez applied immediately, and no/few other candidates were seriously considered,” Brown said. “Gonzalez does have some strong publications … but it seems all .. are from 2001 or earlier. [JAC: 2001 was when Gonzalez was hired at Iowa state. When you begin your first job, the “publication” clock starts anew and your tenure depends on what you accomplish between the time you’re hired and when you come up for tenure.] His publication record since then has been solid but unremarkable.”
Todd, the BSU spokeswoman, said the position was first advertised starting Feb. 1, 2013.
A search committee considered applications until March 27, when a short list of three candidates culled from a total of 40 applicants was selected, Todd said. Gonzalez was picked as the top candidate on April 23.
But Brown says the job was not advertised on the American Astronomical Society’s website until March 1. Most astronomers looking for tenure-track jobs look at the AAS website rather than individual university websites, he said. In addition, the AAS ad gave a deadline of July 1 to apply for the opening, which may have resulted in potential applicants not choosing to apply until it was too late.
Ball State’s department of physics and astronomy was unaware of the mistaken July 1 deadline on the AAS website, Todd said.
The fair thing to do in this case was to extend the deadline to the advertised one—July 1—given that that was the date given in the most widely-read venue for job candidates in astronomy.
“Dr. Gonzalez was aware of the opportunity before it was advertised,” she told The Star Press. “The university received his materials on Jan. 28, 2013. It is common practice in higher education for potential candidates to become aware of opportunities before they are advertised. Faculty talking with their peers about opportunities in their departments helps build a strong pool of candidates.”
That is weaselly. My own department does not make candidates aware of jobs before they are advertised, though we will often seek out individual candidates for “special opportunity” positions that are not competitive. If someone has conveyed this information sub rosa, I don’t know about it, and we’ve certainly not gotten a formal job application before that job was advertised.
Citing personnel policy, Todd declined to disclose the names of the other applicants, including the other two on the short list.
“This all seems very odd,” Brown said. “Why headline the (AAS) ad with a misleading deadline if they were genuinely seeking the best possible astronomers for the position? And since the job was advertised (on the AAS website) on March 1, to be consistent with AAS policies they should have continued to accept applications until April 1 (a 30-day period).”
He added, “Apart from these oddities in the process” there remains the “remarkable coincidence” of two astronomers who believe in ID ending up at the same university.
To me, the timing smells fishy. It’s clear that someone at Ball State must have wanted Gonzalez and contacted him before the job was advertised. I don’t know who the other candidates were, so I can’t say whether Gonzalez was the best qualified. All I can say is that someone clearly had him in mind before the search was announced. And now Ball State University is graced with two ID creationists out of the 16 tenure-track faculty in its department of Physics and Astronomy.
Gonzalez cliams that earth is privileged. Since his book, the number of known exoplanets has gone up to – what? every time I look, the number seems larger – with a steady stream of more and more earth-like ones, despite such small bodies so close to their star being difficult to detect.
Via Wikipedia: In November 2013 it was announced that 22±8% of Sun-like stars have an Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone; Petigura, E. A.; Howard, A. W.; Marcy, G. W. (2013). “Prevalence of Earth-size planets orbiting Sun-like stars”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110 (48): 19273. arXiv:1311.6806. doi:10.1073/pnas.1319909110
Don’t forget that sun-like stars are not the only stars of interest for finding small planets in habitable zones. Smaller stars that are very long lived are also considered candidates. These are far more numerous than sun-like stars.
And, even if only 0.0001% of stars had earth-like planets (same composition and temperature), that means at least a couple hundred such in the Milky Way alone, and more habitable planets in the Universe than there are humans on Earth.
Claiming any sort of statistical privilege for the Earth can only be done by those abjectly ignorant of the scale of reality.
Cheers,
b&
True, but the habitable zone is so close to such stars that the planets are likely to be tidally locked. It’s not clear how much of such a planet would actually be habitable, though once started, life does tend to find it’s way into some pretty hostile climates.
I think the Rare Earth hypothesis, as laid out in
http://www.amazon.com/Rare-Earth-Complex-Uncommon-Universe/dp/0387952896/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1388933331&sr=1-1&keywords=rare+earth
has some interesting points to make, not all of which are refuted by the mere existence of exoplanets.
Gonzalez’ co-option, abuse, and unsupportable extensions of those ideas is pretty disgraceful, however.
Sorry, didn’t realize the link to amazon would blow up into a huge picture like that.
One correction. It wasn’t actually added to the top 10 stories of The Star Press. They were just reporting that it was one of the top 10 stories by Evolution News & Views.
Yes, I know it wasn’t a formal addition, but my claim is that the Star-Press left it out of their own “top ten” list and then added it later when they realized they screwed up, either through this site, which they read, or the Discovery Institute’s site, which they also read.
Hmmmm fishy indeed. I’m surprised that an institution that is publicly financed would not have to adhere to strict guidelines concerning fairness when advertising jobs and hiring as a guard against cronyism/nepotism.
Fishy. (sub)
The stink of hiring impropriety at a public university should be investigated.
At my university, accepting applications before the job is advertised, and considering applications before the published deadline, is illegal. It’s not just university policy, it’s something to do with complying with state or federal equal opportunity guidelines.
If Gonzalez is a white male, preferential consideration of his application would be a violation of the kind that the law is specifically set up to avoid.
But really, the search committee didn’t notice or consider that he’s a creationist? Their job is to screen out unqualified applicants. Just how many of them were willing to recommend Gonzalez as the best candidate? Something is going on there.
Being Hispanic might take him out of the white male camp, and the department is rather diverse so even though it might violate EEO law it would be a tough case to prove.
… and has been illegal for some time. In the mid-70s I went through a lengthy application/interview process for a position at UC Santa Barbara; the field was narrowed down from “several dozen” to 3 candidates after requests for additional information and references. None of us final 3 who were invited to a 1/2 day interview were offered the job.
It turns out they had been forced to re-advertise the position because they hadn’t followed the rules for hiring the first time. So several of us were left hanging and hopeful for 3-4 months while their intention was always to keep the person they hired illegally in the first round.
This is one of the most upsetting things about the process. The wasted time of dozens of people who apply for vacancies that don’t actually exist because they have already been assigned to someone. It is disgraceful.
The Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh has its own intelligent design creationist, Professor David Snoke. Here is his web page: http://www.cityreformed.org/snoke/
I wonder if Ball State would want to hire him? At least he seems to have (I’m not a physicist) a solid publication record. With three I.D.ers they’d have the critical mass needed to create an explosion of intelligent design research!
Snoke is one of very, very few physicists to have published a paper on population genetics in a journal about protein chemistry and structure.
That is a unique accomplishment, I’m sure.
I read that article a few days ago. It is co-authored by Michael Behe. The conclusion was that in asexual organisms without recombination, for reasonable population sizes and #s of generations, evolution would be unlikely to produce novel adaptive proteins requiring two or more individually-neutral mutations.
The model they used was criticized by Lynch in the same journal, but even if their results are taken at face value, the actual population sizes and generation times of bacteria greatly exceed the claimed “unrealistic” limits required by evolution. The kind of double or triple mutations they claim as limiting should actually happen every few years, according to their own model.
Of course they really don’t care about bacteria but vertebrates. However, their model doesn’t apply to vertebrates, because of its assumption of no sex and no recombination.
I suppose Hedin is the chief suspect as early info leaker, but it seems unlikely he acted alone in this. The advertised closing date/small window suggests a dept. chair or similar, no?
Well, here the search committee is the one that takes care of the adversting and the window. But, their doing it this way, and their ultimate acceptance of a creationst, does suggest possible coercion from a higher-up.
We agree Hedin could not have done this alone. Who else was involved and how? Was the search committee stacked? Who can do that?
For the committee to be stacked, there’d have to be at least several ID people on it. From what I’ve heard, Hedin is the only one.
That’s why I think you may be right: a department head or other administrator could have been doing a favor for, say, Hedin, and exerted pressure on the committee, perhaps by refusing to hire the first candidates the committee puts forward until they finally put forward Gonzalez.
Or, the committee could have been stacked (the department head appoints the members) with a majority of faculty who owed the department head a favor, and so yielded to the head’s (or other administrator’s) wish to hire Gonzalez.
So, I guess I’m wrong in saying that there’s have to be more than one ID-er for the committee to be stacked.
Remember way way back at the beginning? <a href="http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/04/25/science-course-at-ball-state-university-sneaks-in-religion/"Jerry contacted that department chair, and that chair was not concerned with one of his faculty members teaching ID.
oops! Sorry about the html goof
I’m less concerned about him knowing in advance that a job was coming open – that is pretty common, at least in my experience. Even accepting an application before the advertisement doesn’t seem too egregious. However, not waiting until a published deadline to consider all available candidates would seem to be pushing the boundaries of legality (as noted above by Garnetstar). The other question that this story begs is why an institution would hire, to a tenure track position, someone who had failed to make tenure elsewhere – unless I suppose, they had suddenly had a major grant funded – and there is no indication of this.
Well, people who fail to get tenure still get jobs elsewhere — usually just at lower tier schools.
Absolutely true. Usually they go to a lower tier. Sometimes they manage to finagle a position at the same tier. I know of many examples of both scenarios.
Sometimes a negative tenure decision appears to be based on politics, where faculty are denied tenure because of political machinations in the department, or because a dean or provost has an agenda of their own and they overturn a tenure recommendation from a department. I know of a few cases that seemed to have politics involved. So the process is not always perfect.
Yeah, we have to keep written records, and turn them in to the administration, of the day that we first start reading applications, and the day that we close deliberations. It seems to be a big deal legally.
Professor Coyne,
There are two sides to any story. You might like to read this:
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/01/at_the_muncie_s080731.html
What facts do you see in that which would cause Jerry to change anything he said?
I wouldn’t waste much energy following that link. Consider the source.
I already followed it, and it’s about as vapid as you’d expect. Maybe I missed something, but I don’t think so. I also thought maybe vjt was imaging facts not present.
Evolutionnews is one of those oxymoronically named sites where ID is supposed to be an entirely different subject than creationism.
A waste of pixels.
@vjtorley: Are you teaching the controversy?
Indeed, Klinghoffer authored the story. At least read this first to understand the biases.
I’d call it beyond bias. Ad hominem ad libitum.
Come on, Torley, Evo News is a the Disco Tute’s propaganda site.
EVERYTHING they publish is either an outright lie or a misrepresentation. I’m surprised you were unable to find an article in the National Enquirer. Perhaps Hedin is really an alien infiltrator pregnant with Prince Charles’ child.
Please, VJ, do better next time and at least amuse us with something from Answers in Genesis or the Institute for Creation Research.
Oh, the famous VenerableJabberwocky.
Didn’t recognize his handle (he said, while carefully cradling his dinner wine =D). Thanks!
Oh, and for those who don’t know: VJ is to be read as “ID”.
Well, you friend Klinghoffer (from the Discovery Institute no less) certainly knows how to alienate people. No less that three gratuitous derogatory comments about Australia/Australians.
VjTorley,
Here is what Gonzalez said in the Discovery Institute article you linked to:
“Seth, via the words of astronomer Michael J. I. Brown, speculates that I knew about the new astronomy position at Ball State prior to its being advertised and that my being hired by Ball State was somehow rigged. I can state categorically that these speculations are false. I responded to a Ball State job advertisement I saw online.”
And here is what Ball University spokesperson said:
“Dr. Gonzalez was aware of the opportunity before it was advertised,” she told The Star Press. “The university received his materials on Jan. 28, 2013…”
Someone is not telling the truth. It is hard to see how the University would benefit by lying about this. That leaves your man….
It is possible that the BSU spokesperson is mistaken about the date that the advertisement went online (“Feb 4”), or about the date the university got his application (“Jan 28”). If so, Gonzalez could have pointed to the online ad he claims he saw, or correct the date of his application, and clear himself. Instead of dealing with facts, he hedges, making vague statements about the number of possible online advertisements.
To place a job ad with the AAS Job Register you have to certify that the closing date will be at least one month after the advert first appears.
If the above information is correct (advert appeared 1st March, shortlisting 27th March) then they broke their promise to the AAS.
Also, to reinforce a point, absolutely everyone in astronomy looks for jobs on the AAS Job Register, few bother looking anywhere else since everything is on the AAS Job Register. Thus, if that gave a July deadline, then almost all of the good candidates would have been working to that deadline.
In case anyone needs to know of the key factor in the decision against Gonzalez while at ISU, this is from Wikipedia, in reference to an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education:
“The Chronicle observed that Gonzalez had no major grants during his seven years at ISU, had published no significant research during that time and had only one graduate student finish a dissertation.”
I cannot think of a circumstance in which a faculty member in a research tenure track position would be granted tenure with such a poor record while at that institution. The decision to make was very clear.
Universities in Indiana seem to be making a name for themselves in terms of shady hiring practices. Purdue hired its president in the most despicable way possible, where the outgoing governor for all practical purposes made himself the president and now this.
Well, what for sure is true is this: there are multiple people in that dept faculty who know exactly what happened, surrounded by a constellation of others who will know at least some of the details. Its not as if the hiring of a new faculty member is an event that involves one or two people only. Guess no one is talking, yet.
Gonzales’s appointment was foretold in the stars.
+1
b&
I have had considerable experience with posting jobs, doing searches and hiring at a state university in Illinois. We were monitored and expected to be extremely careful to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s. It’s my thought that applicants considered but not hired might have a legal case in this instance
Me too. I was on a committee at a state university several years ago in a previous job. We were very hush-hush about all applications in the beginning stages, and we didn’t look at any applications before a specific date. I don’t recall receiving any applications ahead of time but I probably wouldn’t know about it.
In a tight-knit community, it’s certainly an open secret where the openings are if the person leaving the position has been active. In my field our members post fond farewells when they retire, and those jobs aren’t usually listed for months. Not to mention, we are friends with each other and see each other at meetings, so a job-seeker just has to keep his/her ear to the ground. We hear about a person’s new position at a poster session or Starbucks, so we know their old position is open. The official announcement is just the confirmation of what we all knew was coming.
Still…. this situation seems fishy, especially since it all happened before the brouhaha. I could see how applications might have dropped off during the kerfuffle, but if they’d already made up their minds, that’s not a factor.
For Hedin to have gotten away with teaching ID and prosletyzing for years, the department had to be friendly toward his proclivities.
I think so too. My experience with hiring, etc., is the same as yours. A different state, though, so perhaps it’s even a federal law.
I agree that the unsuccessful candidates could have a legal case as well. I spent entirely too much time working in government and we too had to be very careful when hiring people or hiring contractors. Internal promotion was unheard of – candidates had to compete with outsiders as well. This is in Canada but I’m pretty sure similar rules exist in the US for public institutions.
What this meant was, unsuccessful candidates could ask to see how they were evaluated & the could complain to politicians if they felt there was bias or if you did not consistently evaluate them (I used standard evaluation criteria that spat out a score based on ratings and weightings). No employee wanted to be dragged in front of a bunch of politicians to face an accuser (which could happen even if you were innocent) so we kept our i’s dotted, our t’s crossed & our records backed up!
Jerry, my experience is entirely different than yours on one point – by the time we get an ad out it is very common for a lot of people to know about it already, and for just the reason they’ve given. This statement pretty much exactly describes how my (chemistry) department operates. It is also very common for position advertisements to be pretty generic in that we are often looking for top candidates and not being highly specific about what they are doing beyond their subfield (e.g., modern physical chemistry or maybe bioinorganic chemistry), i.e., the ad doesn’t really affect what the candidate will be putting in their application package. We’ve had applicants send their packages to individual faculty in the department before the ad appears and it has no effect on how we treat their application vis-a-vis applications that come after the ads appear, but before the deadline.
The part that is highly questionable is that the position was filled before the application deadline, unless the ad indicated something to the effect the search would remain open until the deadlime or until the position is filled.
I would be reluctant to extend my/your experience in job searches to Ball State to any great extent. A July 1 deadline is totally unheard of for us – for a position starting the next Fall! Even for Assistant profs., typical start-up packages approaching $1 million don’t get handed out 2 months before the the job starts. Our deadlines are more like Dec. 1 and we often don’t even get a chance to go to our second choice if the first choice turns us down – because they’re already gone.
IANAL but the ad said
I seem to recall in the previous brouhaha over the Gonzalez appointment several months ago that there were indications that the chairman of the physics/astronomy department made the selection and subsequently retired. I may be dis-remembering however. there were also indications that he was responsible for allowing Hedin’s course to be taught over several years.
Ok yes I’m waiting for Sunday the playoffs and Downton Abbey.Can’t wait for both, well I come to this site to calm myself.Thanks always an enjoyable read, like good gossip anyway go niners.
Unfortunately, the link to the AAS ad I’ve added to my previous comment is not visible. Here it is in full length:
http://jobregister.aas.org/job_view?JobID=42248