Tenure Discrimination?

May 23, 2007 by Dr. Mc.

The Tenure and Promotion Committee at Iowa State University last month denied tenure to Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez. Gonzalez has appealed to the president of the university, who is expected to issue a decision on the case in June. Having served on a T&P Committees, I appreciate that no one likes to either deny or be denied tenure, but this case is a little suspect. He is appealing because Gonzalez has “published 21 papers since 2002, many in top journals,” according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. He also has received grant funding that partially supported him and the university for 3 years, and he has a normalized h-index of 13 (a measure of how many times one is sited by other scholars). The next highest in his department of 10 is a  normalized h-index of 9. So why is tenure not awarded? Some suspect it is not because of what he didn’t do, but because of what else he did. In 2004 Mr. Gonzalez co-wrote The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery, a scholarly work that openly supports the Intelligent Design philosophy. This same book was developed into a video, which the Smithsonian Institute was to co-sponsor in premiering.. that is until a backlash of objections from key supporters came in. (I do not find it hard to believe that this is a factor in Gonzalez’s tenure denial, especially since my own dissertation proceedings were stopped when it was discovered that I though “natural selection makes more since as an explanation of organization populations than when applied in biology.” I basically had to lie that I changed my mind in order to get on with my PhD.) Please note from Gonzalez’s university bio that he suggests no objection to evolution or an old universe. That is not the real issue in Intelligent Design. It is the Design part (implying a Designer => implying an accountability beyond ourselves). Is this really possible? The most telling statement in the quite honest Chronicle article is, “‘It looks to me like discrimination,’ said one astronomer, who did not want to be named, fearing a backlash for speaking up in favor of an intelligent-design proponent.” If you would like to (nicely) express your opinion to university President Gregory Geoffroy (pronounced JOE-free), upon whose desk this issue now rests, you may contact him here..  

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