10 September 2007
Baylor’s Post Hoc Rationalizations
William Dembski
The Baylor administration, in attempting to justify its censorship of Prof. Robert Marks and his Evolutionary Informatics Lab, is now raising procedural concerns about the proper deployment of labs and groups on the Baylor server as well as doubts about Prof. Marks’s job performance. This is unconscionable. As I have pointed out here at UD, Prof. Marks and others continue to have labs and groups at Baylor that have never received the Baylor administration’s official blessing. Moreover, the idea that “Bob needs to get back to his proper work” is ludicrous given that he keeps scoring major research grants (just one the other day from the NSF) and given that the people faulting him have never been awarded any research grants whatsoever.
To put all this in proper perspective, consider how this whole controversy got going in the first place. It started with Benjamin Kelley, dean of engineering and computer science at Baylor, sending Prof. Marks the following email (I share it here since Dean Kelley copied others at Baylor and had no compunction about embarrassing Prof. Marks with it):
From: Kelley, Benjamin S.
Sent: Friday, July 27, 2007 9:34 AM
To: Marks, Robert J.
Cc: Tucker, Cheryl; Hyde, Truell
Subject: Web siteBob:
I have received several concerned messages this
week about an interview and web site dealing with
evolutionary computing associated ID [sic].
Please disconnect this web site immediately and
Cheryl will arrange a time for us to meet immediately
upon my return. I am teaching in the I5 program
in Shanghai this week.Thanks,
Ben Kelley
Note that Dean Kelley makes no mention of official Baylor policy regarding labs and groups on the Baylor server. Rather, what he stresses is “several concerned messages” (to this day we still don’t know what those messages said or who composed them), a July 20, 2007 interview that Prof. Marks gave about that work (for that interview, go here), and some unstated connection between Prof. Marks’s work in evolutionary informatics with “ID.” That’s guilt by association in my book.
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1
Joseph
09/10/2007
11:02 am
eNow I get it-
Trying to determine the reality behind our existence isn’t important, but blindly following dogma is.
Got it. Thanks Baylor…
2
Borne
09/10/2007
11:28 am
eAfter following these discussions on Baylor, I would never send my kids to there. Nor any other school that, while claiming Christian roots and values, undermines those values by the censorship of those who attempt to do research into fundamental questions about life.
3
rrf
09/10/2007
11:34 am
eBaylor certainly has shown us which side they think their butter is breaded on. Hopefully, the university sponsoring the ID friendly research center you mentioned earlier this year has more intestinal fortitude.
4
John Kelly
09/10/2007
12:25 pm
eIt looks like the ordinary mix of politics and corporate management to me.
5
StephenB
09/10/2007
1:06 pm
eThat letter is what they call a “smoking gun.” In spite of the clumsy syntax, the message comes through loud and clear–”You are keeping b-a-a-d company.” The only way out is to prove (not simply claim) that there was a prohibitive policy and a REASON FOR ITS EXISTENCE already in place.
6
O'Leary
09/10/2007
1:52 pm
eMaybe we are missing the big picture here. guys.
The adminbots of the Protestant Notorious Dame don’t care whether Marks gets research grants.
Maybe they’ll give them all back - they’ve done that before.
They don’t care if he does world class work, actually.
They wouldn’t care if he won a Nobel Prize. It would be a huge embarrassment.
Look, it’s this simple, guys: They don’t want Marks around if there is any chance that he can demonstrate that Darwin was wrong.
In order to be accepted by the people they worship, they must get a whole bunch more Christian students cheering for Darwin. And nowadays that means finding a bunch of profs willing to lie for Darwin.
Anyone who has read Behe’s Edge of Evolution has to know that all is NOT well at Darwin Inc., and the smart money should be sneaking away.
But Baylor has invested too much in demonstrating that if only the atheistic materialists would just stop SNEERING for a moment - Baylor is no problem to them, after all. Baylor isn’t going to upset anything. Honest.
Not one single little blessed thing.
Not at all. It’s just the Protestant Notorious Dame, doing … well, whatever they do…
7
Joseph
09/10/2007
4:32 pm
eThe Nobel prize committee has already made it clear that people with Creation-like ideas are not welcome. That was evident in the flap pertaining to the guy who was the pinoneer behind MRIs- Dr Raymond Damadian.
(2003 Nobel Prize for Medicine went to two other Drs that contributed to the field of MRI).
See here
8
Rude
09/10/2007
5:09 pm
eThe “Protestant Notorious Dame,” eh? Well, indeed, or maybe “Mainstream Religion” so as not to let all those cowards in Catholocism and Judaism off the hook. I’m no Young Earther and surely don’t care for the hostility some of those groups now evidence for ID. But let’s give the YECs their due for seeing ahead of everyone else the real enemy, Darwin, just as Catholocism—though overlooking Darwin—saw early on Darwin’s Deadly Daughter: The Culture of Death.
9
StephenB
09/10/2007
5:10 pm
eTo be sure, Baylor’s administrators are suppressing professor Marks work to preserve their Darwinian stronghold, but they must appear to be doing it for some other reason. That means, of course, that the reasons provided will be phony and varied–at least until talking points are established.
Top management claims that Professor Marks violated some mysterious code, but middle management contends that he was hanging out with the wrong people. Obviously, the middle management position will soon be subsumed into the alleged procedural violation so that the school doesn’t look ridiculous.
Apparently, there were no procedural standards in the first place. Since that is something that can be proven, the right strategy seems clear: At least for now, focus more on due process violations and less on the Darwinist ideology that informed them.