Posted on 07/31/2014 2:58:12 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
A young-Earth creationist microscope technician formerly at California State University-Northridge is suing his former employer for religious discrimination, wrongful termination, and the violation of free speech.
Mark H. Armitage. Mr. Armitage is a microscopist; he's worked with microscope sales and services since at least 1984. When not involved in commercial microscopy, he is interested in scientific microscopy. He did undergraduate work without a degree in Biology at the University of Florida, he acquired a B.S. in Education at Liberty University, an M.S. in Biology (emphasis in parasitology) at the Institute for Creation Research, an Ed.S. in Science Education from Liberty University, and is a doctoral candidate at Liberty University in Science Educational Leadership.
He's managed electron microscope labs at the Institute for Creation Research, at the Creation Research Society Van Andel Creation Research Center, at Azusa Pacific University and at the Biology Department at California State University-Northridge (henceforth, CSUN). He was an Adjunct Professor at Azusa Pacific University and was at least some of the time an Instructor at CSUN.
The Board of Trustees of CSU, CSUN Biology Professor Ernest Kwok, CSUN Biology Department head of technical services William Krohmer, and CSUN Biology Chair Randy Cohen.
Mr. Armitage applied/interviewed/etc. for a position at CSUN in late 2009. During the interview process he informed the interview panel (two professors and Mr. Krohmer) that he had published positively about young-earth creationism. CSUN and/or the Biology Department and/or his interview panel and/or the Electron Microscopy/Confocal Committee apparently were okay with this, they offered him a two-day-per-week technician position deemed "permanent part-time" and he accepted. It sounds like things were going okay until some stuff started to happen in 2012.
In March of 2012, Dr. Oppenheimer, the Chair of the Electron Microscopy/Confocal Committee, sent an email to the Biology Department stating that Mr. Armitage was doing a good job. Mr. Armitage mentions in his lawsuit that, as of that time, his young-earth creationist beliefs were "generally unknown to students, faculty, and staff".
In middle May of 2012, Mr. Armitage went to a dinosaur dig in the Hell Creek Formation of Montana. This dig was conducted with Dr. Kevin Anderson (fellow young-earth creationist) and guided by Mr. Otis Kline (also a young-earth creationist). The dig was being done expressly to find dinosaur bones to break them apart to find soft tissue. Pieces of horn, rib, and vertebrae, presumably from Triceratops, were discovered on this dig, and the specimens were studied at CSUN.
Then Mr. Armitage's big week happens. He doesn't mention it in his lawsuit, but on June 7-9th, 2012, the Creation Research Society Board of Directors had their meeting, Mr. Armitage, as a member of the board, attended and talked about his less-than-a-month-old project. He was interviewed by a young-earth creationist podcast on June 8th, talking about his preliminary findings. That day, Mr. Armitage also appeared at the Rocky Mountain Creation Fellowship's monthly meeting identifying as a Biologist at CSU-Northridge, speaking about how scientific timescales must be wrong. This is relatively a lot of vocalism by Mr. Armitage about his beliefs, and possibly the most vocal he is about his beliefs since he was hired at CSUN.
By this time, Dr. Oppenheimer had retired and Dr. Kwok had become the new Chair of the Electron Microscope/Confocal Committee. He was, for all intents and purposes, Mr. Armitage's new supervisor. This change of Chair occurred around the same time that Mr. Armitage was studying the Triceratops specimen at CSUN. According to the lawsuit:
In demonstrating the use of a microscope to students, Plaintiff would engage in brief socratic dialogue about the possible age of the horn. These types of exchanges were consistent with leading students through the scientific method and were within the scope of Plaintiff's employment. One of Dr. Kwok's students was stunned by the discovery and its implications and went to tell Dr. Kwok about it.
This description of events sounds like Mr. Armitage informed some students of his young-earth creationist beliefs, and this might be where Dr. Kwok, his new supervisor, found out about them as well. Unmentioned by the lawsuit, students (undergrad? grad?) in biology departments are not big fans of hearing about young-earth creationism, so at least one of these students might have thought Mr. Armitage was proselytizing to them, even if he didn't intend to.
So on June 12th (the first day of work after Mr. Armitage returned from his young-earth creationist meeting), Mr. Armitage accuses Dr. Kwok of going into Mr. Armitage's lab and saying "We are not going to tolerate your religion in this department!! This is a science department and we will only have science here – none of your creationist projects or your religion." Mr. Armitage told Mr. Krohmer and Dr. Cohen about this incident, Mr. Krohmer and Dr. Cohen tell Mr. Armitage that there's no problem, they'll do something about it, but Mr. Armitage alleges that this is all they did about the incident.
I find it odd that Dr. Kwok got upset with Mr. Armitage three days after Mr. Armitage was at a young-earth creationist meeting. Was Mr. Armitage extra-chatty that day with students about how the Earth is thousands of years old? Was he extra-chatty because he had been recently talking to fellow young-earth creationists? The timing here seems really odd.
Mr. Armitage and Dr. Anderson's paper is submitted on December 9th 2012, revised December 28th, accepted for publication on January 3rd, 2013, and on February 13th 2013, the paper is published online as an early-access article in Acta Histochemica (said article is published as text in July of 2013). That day, Dr. Kwok apparently has a secret gathering wherein a decision is made to fire Mr. Armitage. A week later Mr. Krohmer tells Mr. Armitage his days at CSUN are numbered, and on February 27th Mr. Armitage is fired.
In July of 2013 Mr. Armitage filed a Fair Employment and Housing Act complaint at the state of California, in response the Department of Fair Employment & Housing told him he had a right to sue within one year, and a year later (4 days ago) the lawsuit appeared.
He certainly thinks so, and a lot of content online is presenting this story as if this was definitely the case. From what I can find online, it sound like Mr. Armitage initially got into trouble with his new supervisor because he inadvertently talked to a/some student/s about young-earth creationism. His new supervisor was apparently unaware of Mr. Armitage's beliefs, and didn't much appreciate them. This trouble with his supervisor appears to have not blown over, if anything it apparently got worse, leading to a situation wherein it looks like the paper's online publication made Dr. Kwok push for Mr. Armitage's termination. Maybe that's a coincidence, maybe Dr. Kwok just wanted Mr. Armitage gone by the end of February...
Dr. Kwok had an employee who he found out was a young-earth creationist, who was talking to students about young-earth creationism, and who was going to publish an article, with a fellow young-earth creationist, about specimens that said employee believes are evidence of young-earth creationism. All of these factors might have led to a willingness to let Mr. Armitage go and find a replacement for the position.
Mr. Armitage's lawsuit mentions, without further comment, that the same former Chair who praised Mr. Armitage's work in March of 2012 also stated that the lab needed another employee, because Mr. Armitage's two-days-per-week employment was not enough to meet the demands of the lab. The lab is currently functioning and has staff, so it seems like Mr. Armitage was let go so that his job could be expanded and filled by someone else.
But we have to wait for the rest of the story to develop before we really know what occurred.
The Planet Earth knows nothing of Creation
Sounds like he were doing his job and the students a service.
Look - I (personally) think young Earth creationism is total BS. But - by bringing up an alternate point of view he were doing something that far more teachers should: teaching the students to examine the evidence and THINK. Not just vomit up whatever textbook the professor happened to write last summer.
There's his problem right there. He was a lab tech. Going off and speaking at a conference (any conference, but a YEC conference is going to draw more attention) and holding himself out as a "Biologist at CSU-Northridge" was not a smart career move, to put it mildly.
You’ll have to explain what that sentence means.
Hate to be the grammar nazi but what in Hades is going on with this “he were” business. The past tense of “he is” is “he was”, not “he were”.
Habit, sorry. I often dictate to the computer rather than typing, since I talk fast and type slow. Using were instead of was is part of the local dialect I grew up with, and I forget to correct it a lot of the time. Can’t catch it with spell check because it’s a valid word.
One of those annoying brain farts we all get from time to time.
That’s because it’s a chunk of lifeless dirt.
Roger that. I wondered if spell check might not be involved somehow...
Out of curiosity, what part of the country are you from that used “were” in funny places as part of the dialect?
I’m English - North Yorkshire WAS where I was raised (nearly slipped!). There are all sorts of odd (or very odd) ways of saying things there, really old and harking back to Old Saxon and Viking, and your mind just accepts them. The stuff you learn as a kid never really goes away.
Have you ate, instead of have you eaten, for example.
I’m pretty scrupulous about using spell check, but if that red line isn’t there, just don’t notice sometimes.
I couldn’t create a typewriter if you gave me a million :)
Oh, okay, English. Now it’s all making sense. You guys do have see some funky archaic-isms. Sometimes English dialect quirks aren’t so much wrong as just a few centuries out of date.
Oddly - according to many linguists, which is a really odd job to have, you Americans have a purer form of the original language, say from Shakespeare’s time. Your pronunciation, at least. Except for aluminium - that’s just barbaric the way you butcher an innocent word :)
If people want to say he was fired for his religious beliefs then fine. I'd say that if he was spreading young earth creationism in an academic setting then I'd say he was fired because he didn't know his field.
Having said that, I'm puzzled by these goings-on. Did he in fact find soft tissue in bones that should have been completely fossilized? That is, tissue that hadn't become fossilized? That's a crucial issue, but it seems to have become lost in the debate over his alleged religious beliefs. If true, it's an important scientific finding, with lots of implications for what we think we know about biology, chemistry, and a lot of other things.
Finally, I'm disturbed that researchers were digging up bones only to break them. Surely there are better ways of getting samples from their interiors than destroying the bones. Doesn't sound like good science to me.
RE: . I’d say that if he was spreading young earth creationism in an academic setting then I’d say he was fired because he didn’t know his field.
From the article:
” During the interview process he informed the interview panel (two professors and Mr. Krohmer) that he had published positively about young-earth creationism.”
Why did they hire him knowing this?
RE: Did he in fact find soft tissue in bones that should have been completely fossilized? That is, tissue that hadn’t become fossilized?
From CBS News Local:
EXCERPT:
While at the Hell Creek Formation excavation site in Montana, researcher Mark Armitage discovered what he believed to be the largest triceratops horn ever unearthed at the site, according to attorney Brad Dacus of Pacific Justice Institute.
Upon examination of the horn under a high-powered microscope back at CSUN, Dacus says Armitage was “fascinated” to find soft tissue on the sample – a discovery Bacus said stunned members of the school’s biology department and even some students“because it indicates that dinosaurs roamed the earth only thousands of years in the past rather than going extinct 60 million years ago.”
You can find an abstract of the paper Mark Hollis Armitage wrote here:
TITLE:
Soft sheets of fibrillar bone from a fossil of the supraorbital horn of the dinosaur Triceratops horridus.
Department of Biology, California State University, 18111 Nordhoff Street, Northridge, CA 91330-8303, USA. Electronic address: . Acta histochemica (Impact Factor: 1.61). 02/2013; DOI: 10.1016/j.acthis.2013.01.001
Just for your information,
Here’s an episode of Ian Juby’s show that contains an interview with Mark Armitage:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abhgreIBKZ0&index=19&list=UU23yiJV4Bkagj5dkH-UyHFA
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