A Rather Careless Piece of Research by the Weekly Standard

Consider two professors at the same school, both seeking tenure (at a school where 91% of those considered for tenure get it--so it isn't hard). One of the professors unfavorably compares a major document of Western civilization with Mein Kampf. The other?

According to a Smithsonian/NASA astrophysics database, Gonzalez's scientific articles from 2001 to 2007 rank the highest among astronomers in his department according to a standard measure of how frequently they have been cited by other scientists. He has published 68 peer-reviewed articles, which beat the ISU department's standard for tenure by 350 percent. He has also co-authored a standard astronomy textbook, published by Cambridge University Press, which his faculty colleagues use in their own classes.

I quickly looked over the results of this search for Gonzalez's email address in scholar.google.com, and it does indeed seem to be the case that his many scholarly papers are often cited. (I searched by email address because there is another astronomy professor at the University of Washington with the same name, who also has a lot of published papers.)

So which one got tenure?

DESPITE A STELLAR RESEARCH RECORD, Iowa State University astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez is being forced out of his job for the expression--outside the classroom--of an inconvenient personal belief.

In 2004, Gonzalez co-wrote a book called The Privileged Planet. He argued that life on earth and our ability to make scientific discoveries about the cosmos depend on a host of incredibly improbable planetary conditions--the preponderance of which suggested intelligent design rather than cosmic accident as the explanation for the universe.

Gonzalez never taught this material to students. But if he and co-author Jay Richards (a former colleague of mine) are right, then the late astronomer Carl Sagan was wrong when he mocked our human "delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe." Privileged Planet was praised on its dust jacket by senior scholars at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and England's Cambridge University.

Gonzalez was up for tenure at ISU this spring. He didn't make the cut. Which, in academia, is the equivalent of being fired (with a year's grace time to look for other work).

Normally, it is not especially difficult to attain tenure at ISU. In 2007, 91 percent of tenure applications were approved, including that of Hector Avalos, a religious-studies teacher. Avalos, was elevated to a full professorship despite wildly anti-religious statements in a 2005 book (Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence) which compared the Bible unfavorably with Hitler's Mein Kampf. Avalos wrote, "Mein Kampf does not contain a single explicit command for genocide equivalent to those found in the Hebrew Bible. . . . Thus, if all of Mein Kampf is to be rejected simply for its implied genocidal policies, we should certainly reject all of the Bible for some of its explicit and blatant genocidal policies."

At first glance, this tells us something of what positions are acceptable to take outside of the classroom at Iowa State University, and which are not. This article about the subject from the Ames Tribune would also suggest that political motivations drove the decision to deny tenure:

In the summer of 2005, three faculty members at ISU drafted a statement against the use of intelligent design in science. One of those authors, Hector Avalos, told The Tribune at the time he was concerned the growing prominence of Gonzalez's work was beginning to market ISU as an "intelligent design school."

The statement collected signatures of support from more than 120 ISU faculty members before similar statements surfaced at the University of Iowa and the University of Northern Iowa.

According to ISU's policy on promotion and tenure, evaluation is based "primarily on evidence of scholarship in the faculty member's teaching, research/creative activities, and/or extension/professional practice."

In addition to that criteria, Gonzalez's department of astronomy and physics sets a benchmark for tenure candidates to author at least 15 peer-reviewed journal articles of quality. Gonzalez said he submitted 68, of which 25 have been written since he arrived at ISU in 2001.

"I believe that I fully met the requirements for tenure at ISU," he said.

However, this article from the Des Moines Register suggests that money is the issue:

Ames, Ia. - An Iowa State University professor who advocates say was denied academic tenure because he pushed the theory of intelligent design raised significantly less research grant money than his peers who achieved tenure.

Iowa State University has sponsored $22,661 in outside grant money for Guillermo Gonzalez since July 2001, records show. In that same time period, Gonzalez's peers in physics and astronomy secured an average of $1.3 million by the time they were granted tenure, which is basically a lifetime appointment at the university.

"Essentially, he had no research funding," said Eli Rosenberg, chairman of the physics and astronomy department where Gonzalez is employed. "That's one of the issues."

Outside grant money pays for research, which includes everything from supporting graduate students to lab equipment to travel.

It's becoming more of a factor in tenure decisions across the university, Rosenberg said.

"At all levels of the university it has gotten more intense to look at that," he said. "In order to survive doing research, (you) have to support graduate students and travel. You have to generate that money yourself."

It is not uncommon for universities to use outside grant money as a criterion in tenure decisions, particularly in the sciences, said Jonathan Knight, who directs the program in academic freedom and tenure at the American Association of University Professors.

"The competition has become stiffer and fewer projects are being funded, and so the individuals are now being turned down to tenure because they are not able to get the funding," he said.

Advocates for Gonzalez have noted he authored more peer-reviewed papers than what his department had said was needed for someone of his rank to achieve tenure.

"The overarching and the most important thing is really my publication record," said Gonzalez, who said he's published 68 peer-reviewed papers during his career.

He pointed to ISU's physics and astronomy tenure policy, which said promotion to an associate professor requires potential to achieve a national or international reputation, a standard demonstrated by the publication of 15 papers in peer-reviewed journals.

The article from the Weekly Standard says that Avalos received tenure, but over here is the claim that Avalos did not receive tenure, but was only promoted to full professor.

I really don't know what to think. It might well be that Gonzalez's support for ID played a part in the denial of tenure, but there are other possible explanations as well, and I'm not too impressed with the level of research that this Weekly Standard article shows.

UPDATE: A reader with connections to the professional astronomers tells me that the Gonzalez at University of Washington and Iowa State University are the same guy, and as you might well expect, this guy is a superstar among professional astronomers--which makes anti-Christian bias an even more likely explanation for the refusal to give him tenure.