The Texas Observer

The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board asked a team of academics to keep an open mind about creationism, according to emails obtained by the Observer. In an October 8th email to four people recruited for a “site evaluation team” slated to visit the Institute for Creation Research in Dallas, Linda McDonough of the Coordinating Board, wrote:

As you all know, creationism is a controversial issue with strong feelings on both sides. I’m sorry to have to put this bluntly, but, would you, as an evaluator, be able to put aside any opinions you may have on the issue and give an unbiased report on the education side of the degree program and how it meets the standards set by the [Coordinating Board]? Please respond by email as soon as possible.

The ICR, which wants permission from the coordinating board to offer a master’s in science education, believes, contrary to a mountain of indisputable scientific evidence and God-given common sense, that a few thousand years ago the good Lord took six literal days to create the sun, moon, plants, people, dinosaurs and the apes we didn’t evolve from.

(For those now wondering if dinosaurs coexisted with humans - yes, ICR says, Noah had compact baby dinos on the Ark and after the Flood people hunted them into extinction. This explanation, IMO, is an improvement over the one I heard as a kid - that dinosaur fossils were planted by God to test our faith.)

Evolutionary thinking is not only a falsehood, according to ICR, but also causes abortion, promiscuity, drug abuse, and homosexuality, according to their irony-free Web site. The Institute requires all faculty members and students to accept a “limitation to academic freedom” - an oath to Biblical Literalism and a pledge of allegiance to Jesus. Let’s just say these folks aren’t just evolution skeptics, but hardcore creationists.

The evaluation team’s job was to issue a report on whether ICR deserves state accreditation based on 21 criteria. The report was submitted to the six-member Certification Advisory Council, which recommended on December 14 that the Coordinating Board approve ICR’s application. What happens next is largely up to Higher Ed Commissioner Raymund Paredes, who has wisely convened a panel of renowned scientists and educators to advise him. Sources say the panel held its first meeting Monday.

Two of the four email recipients - Rusty Waller, an assistant professor of educational leadership at Texas A&M-Commerce and Baptist preacher, and Gloria White, managing director of the Dana Center for Mathematics and Science Education at UT-Austin - ended up serving on the four-person team.

Waller readily agreed to McDonough’s request. “Certainly! I will only consider the standards,” he wrote in a reply email.

However, Cathy Loving, an associate professor of teaching, learning and culture at Texas A&M-College Station, agreed to serve on the team but took issue with McDonough’s request to remain neutral on pseudoscience. Loving fired back at McDonough:

Of course I have opinions—based on many years of research and writing. These opinions are very much on the “education side of the degree program and how it meets the standards of THECB.” I assume part of the education requirements of the Board’s standards involves the content of the courses. That is the controversial part—and the Institute will have to convince evaluators that the content is about science and about education—and that science and religion are taught with adequate distinctions. If they cannot do that, then there is no way I can support a program that calls itself “science education.”

“Creation science” is more than controversial. It has been ruled illegal to teach in public schools, according to decisions in Dover, Pennsylvania and then in the Supreme Court. But beyond that, even if private institutions are allowed to teach creationism—they must show the evaluators how their theory is presented in such a manner that “science education” meets a reasonable definition of science and not religious belief. Surely the Board has a reasonable definition of science.

In the end, Loving withdrew from the site evaluation team because her husband was scheduled for surgery that day. She is unsure whether McDonough would have accepted her response because she never received more than a cursory reply. But Loving told the Observer that she was “disappointed”" in the evaluation team’s report. Apparently, McDonough found a group of academics who could manage to suspend disbelief remain “unbiased” about the ICR’s pseudoscience. The report found, in a section evaluating ICR’s curriculum, that the school’s “embedded component of creationist perspectives/views, is nevertheless a plausible program” and “generally comparable to an initial master’s degree in science education from one of the smaller, regional universities in the state.” (Gloria White, who authored the section on curriculum, did not return our calls to her office.)

“To suggest that [ICR’s degree] would be equivalent to a degree from one of the smaller, regional universities was a huge insult to scientists and science educators at regional universities,” said Loving, who has reviewed the school’s curriculum. “The big issue is they’re calling it a master’s of science education. If you’re going to use the word ’science’ then you’ve got to abide by certain standards that are across the board.”

McDonough defends her request of the evaluators. “We just wanted to make sure the site review team was going to go in and look at the material presented to us by ICR according to the coordinating board’s standards,” she told the Observer today. “They couldn’t look at the library and say ‘oh they have all these books but they’re creationism books’ or something like that. Their charge was to look at the 21 standards and look at the information ICR had given the site team and meet those standards.”

McDonough refused to directly address whether her request to remain unbiased was a condition of being an evaluator. “You’re putting me on the spot there my dear. I don’t have to explain to you how emotional this whole thing has gotten.” When pressed, McDonough said she didn’t know because she “didn’t have to cross that bridge” with Loving or the others.

Unfortunately, scientists do have a bias against creationism, as Loving points out. And rightfully so. Science is biased towards empirical reality and testable hypotheses; creationism is biased towards the diktats of religion. It seems unfair - if not a little Orwellian - to ask professionals with scientific training to set aside the cornerstone, time-tested theory of modern biology in order to give pseudoscience a fair shake.

What if I wanted to offer a science degree and my school largely consisted of teaching credulous students that the earth is flat, the sun is really God’s flashlight, and - what the heck - gravity is a trick played on us by the Devil? Under McDonough’s logic, the coordinating board would check to make sure my campus had working smoke detectors and a good student-to-faculty ratio but not bother to see if what I taught made any sense whatsoever.

McDonough wouldn’t take the bait on that one, reiterating that evaluators must look to the standards alone for guidance.

But in another email obtained by the Observer, Dr. Robert Cloud of Baylor, a member of the Certification Advisory Council, explains in greater detail the reasoning behind supporting ICR’s application. ICR “is a private, sectarian institution that by its own admission offers a narrowly-tailored curriculum to a very small student population. If approved by the [Coordinating Board] the ICR Masters program in Science Education will reflect that narrow mission - no more, no less.” Cloud writes that ICR will still need to seek accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) to establish credibility.

This reasoning is “obnoxious,” says Steven Schafersman, of Texas Citizens for Science. “He is passing off the problem to SACS rather than making the principled and
correct decision now to refuse to grant ICR certification to give science education graduate degrees. This is cowardly and irresponsible”

by Forrest Wilder

This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 7:00 pm and is filed under Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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