Posted on 09/05/2007 8:06:33 PM PDT by SirLinksalot
WACO, Texas (BP)--Baylor University officials ordered the shutdown of a personal website of one of a handful of the school's distinguished professors because of anonymous concerns that the site, hosted on the university’s server, supported Intelligent Design.
Robert Marks, distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Baylor, launched a website called the Evolutionary Informatics Lab in June to examine whether Darwinian processes like random mutation and natural selection can generate new information.
Marks' conclusions, as explained on the website, placed limits on the scope of Darwinism and offered scientific support for Intelligent Design.
In July, a podcast interview with Marks appeared on a website run by the pro-ID Discovery Institute, and a week later Benjamin Kelley, dean of engineering at Baylor, told Marks to remove the Evolutionary Informatics website immediately.
"This is a big story, perhaps the biggest story yet of academic suppression relating to ID," William Dembski, a research professor in philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, told Baptist Press.
"Robert Marks is a world-class expert in the field of evolutionary computing, and yet the Baylor administration, without any consideration of the actual content of Marks' work at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, decided to shut it down simply because there were anonymous complaints linking the lab to Intelligent Design," Dembski said.
Dembski himself was at the center of a controversy involving Baylor and Intelligent Design in 2000 when he was removed from his post as director of the school's Michael Polanyi Center for Complexity, Information, and Design after refusing to rescind a statement supporting Intelligent Design as a legitimate form of academic inquiry.
Lori Fogleman, director of media communications at Baylor, told Baptist Press Sept. 5 that the school's objection to the website involves standards by which something can or cannot attach its name to Baylor.
"This isn't about the content of the website. Really the issue is related to Baylor's policies and procedures of approving centers, institutes, products using the university's name," Fogleman said. "Baylor reserves the exclusive right to the use of its own name, and we're pretty jealous in the protection of that name. So it has nothing to do with the content but is all about how one goes about establishing a center, an institute, a product using the university's name."
In response to the dean's order to remove the Evolutionary Informatics website, Marks requested a meeting with Baylor legal counsel to resolve the matter. Six days before the scheduled Aug. 9 meeting, Kelley entered Marks' Baylor webspace and, without his consent, removed all references to the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, according to a timeline Dembski sent to BP.
The Aug. 9 meeting involved John Gilmore, an attorney who advised Dembski in 2000 and now represents Marks, Baylor Provost Randall O'Brien, Kelley and Baylor attorneys including Charles Beckenhauer, chief counsel for the school. Baylor officials asked that Marks add a disclaimer to his website and remove anything that could imply the lab is a Baylor initiative.
"Randall O'Brien signs off on the EIL site going back up and closes the meeting with prayer," Dembski's timeline states.
An Aug. 21 e-mail from Beckenhauer to Gilmore included what the Baylor chief counsel called his "proposed fixes" to the website, which by then existed only as a mirror site, not viewable by the general public. Gilmore responded by saying the matter had been settled at the Aug. 9 meeting with the provost and that Beckenhauer's recommendations were out of line.
On Aug. 30, Beckenhauer told Gilmore via e-mail that "there is now a long trail of information that inappropriately links independent research to the Baylor name," and he said the website issue centered on "misleading representations of your client and his collaborator (Dr. Dembski)."
Research papers that Dembski and Marks wrote jointly were on the website, and Dembski said his connection with the lab had been evident from the start.
Beckenhauer said the Aug. 9 meeting was not meant to be a final agreement, and he expressed concerns that Marks and Dembski had created a "trail of inaccuracies" that would lead people to believe Baylor had given direct support for what in reality was an independent project.
"All the circumstantial evidence points to John Lilley, Baylor's president, as being behind this effort to stamp out ID at Baylor," Dembski told Baptist Press. "The provost was at the crucial Aug. 9 meeting; the president wasn't. Lilley is the only one with the authority to overturn what the provost agreed to at that meeting."
Dembski, in comments to the Southern Baptist Texan newsjournal Sept. 4, underscored the hypersensitivity surrounding Intelligent Design in scholastic institutions these days.
"You have to understand, in the current academic climate, Intelligent Design is like leprosy or heresy in times past," he said. "To be tagged as an ID supporter is to become an academic pariah, and this holds even at so-called Christian institutions that place a premium on respectability at the expense of truth and the offense of the Gospel."
Dembski said he knows of several faculty members at Baylor who support Intelligent Design, but they are mostly younger faculty who don't have tenure and don't speak up on the topic. An old guard at Baylor, he said, supports secularization.
"John Lilley, in attempting to pacify that old guard, and perhaps because of a sense of foreboding about how Baylor might be perceived in the wider university culture if it were seen as supporting Intelligent Design or as even allowing it merely a presence, has therefore decided to come down hard against it," Dembski said.
Intelligent Design "in a sense became a poster child" of what immediate past president Robert Sloan tried to accomplish at Baylor, seeking to rescue the Baptist General Convention of Texas-affiliated school from its slide into secularization before he resigned under pressure in 2005, Dembski noted.
Aside from the hot-button issue of Intelligent Design, Dembski said the way the Baylor administration has dealt with Marks in this case is "inexcusable by any standard, certainly Christian but even secular."
"I've been at MIT, Princeton University, Notre Dame, Cornell, Northwestern and the University of Chicago, and at none of these schools have I ever have witnessed the shameful treatment that Baylor has accorded to Robert Marks," Dembski said.
"... [Marks] was a star in his department at the University of Washington in Seattle for 26 years before Baylor recruited him, and now Baylor is subjecting him to treatment that even so 'liberal' and 'secular' a place as UW would find unconscionable," Dembski added. "Yes, there are academic freedom issues here, but at this point the issue is one of plain decency."
Robert Crowther of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture told Baptist Press the institute is watching the Marks situation from an academic freedom standpoint.
"We're deeply concerned that the administration at Baylor University has really not shown any support for academic freedom or freedom of scientific inquiry in shutting down a website and a research project of one of their distinguished faculty," Crowther said. "We find that very troubling. It does show a certain trend at Baylor."
Crowther said he believes Intelligent Design has become such a controversial issue in academia because of the scientific threat it poses. The Scopes Trial should have settled the issue, he said, but discoveries since then have altered the discussion.
"What has changed is the science. We know things now and there are new discoveries being made all the time that are leading a number of scientists to not just question Darwinian evolution but to actively pursue research into Intelligent Design," Crowther said. "The thing that is driving this really is the science. We wouldn't be having the debate if there wasn't something going on in science that was causing a lot of questions to rise from most of the scientists."
See here
On Thursday (12.07.06) I learned it was definite that Baylor University was revoking a postdoctoral fellowship that I held in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Last month (11.06) I was appointed as Senior Research Scientist in that department to work on a project in information theory with Prof. Robert Marks. That project was funded through a grant that he procured specifically for me to work with him. Here are the facts:
(1) Robert Marks , Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, procured a small grant from the LifeWorks Foundation so that I could work with him on the Baylor campus. The grant was to extend for two years. Robert Marks and I have been working on a project in information theory since the spring of 2005.
(2) This grant and the invitation to work with Prof. Marks was entirely at his initiative. I had worked at Baylor from 1999-2005 as Associate Research Professor in the Conceptual Foundations of Science. During that time my work on intelligent design was continually vilified at Baylor and I personally was ostracized from much of the Baylor community. Nonetheless, during that time I always found the engineering faculty congenial, who invited me regularly to give special lectures on intelligent design to their students. In the past, I’ve had postdoctoral fellowships at MIT, Princeton, University of Chicago, etc. At these institutions, I always found that senior faculty members can hire any qualified person to work with him, no questions asked. Thus, despite my controversial history at Baylor, I felt that my place in engineering and Robert Marks’s lab would be secure. Hence my willingness to accept Prof. Marks’s offer to work with him back at Baylor.
(3) Having procured the grant from Lifeworks, Robert Marks had it processed through normal administrative channels. At no point in the process did the Baylor administration raise any flags. The documentation on the grant clearly specified the work to be done and my role (by name as a third-party beneficiary) in it. Ultimately President John Lilley of Baylor signed off on the grant, sending a letter with his signature to the Lifeworks Foundation thanking them for it (I have a pdf scan copy of that letter).
(4) My appointment as Senior Research Scientist in Baylor’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering began November 2006. The dean and department head were aware of my presence in the department and for one month raised no objection. I was given a small windowless office in the engineering building (Rogers 305A), which I planned to use once or twice a week. I had no teaching duties — this was strictly a research position. Also, I had access to the Baylor library and online journals.
(5) My day-job is as Research Professor in Philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary , from which I derive my salary and benefits. I commute to Ft. Worth for that job two to three times per week. In procuring a grant for me to work with him, Robert Marks was fully aware of that position at Southwestern. Moreover, my immediate superior in Southwestern’s School of Theology, Prof. Douglas Blount, was aware that I had this appointment at Baylor. Neither saw any conflict of interest in my being at both Baylor and Southwestern (more on this in point (9)).
(6) On Monday (12.04.06), I was called into Ben Kelley’s office (the dean of Baylor’s School of Engineering and Computer Science) at 7:00am in the morning. Robert Marks attended the meeting. Dean Kelley informed us that there were concerns with my being again on campus (I had been on faculty at Baylor from 1999 to 2005) and that I might need to be let go “for the good of the School of Engineering and Computer Science.” Dean Kelley declined to answer who was raising these concerns (Robert Marks pressed him twice on this point). Nor did Dean Kelley elaborate on the nature of the concerns, though he did mention that resources to the School of Eng/CompSci might be cut on account of my presence there. At no point did he bring up my connection with intelligent design (ID) as a reason for concern. Nor did he question my qualifications to work in the engineering school (in fact, he commended my mathematical sophistication).
(7) On Tuesday (12.05.06) there was a meeting of Baylor’s Faculty Senate — President John Lilley and Provost Randall O’Brien were in attendance. At that meeting, President Lilley remarked that my appointment was to be revoked and that the grant Robert Marks procured for me to work with him would be returned to the LifeWorks Foundation. The reason given was that a “technicality” had been missed in the processing of the grant (no elaboration at that time of what this technicality was). On Wednesday (12.06.06) , Dean Kelley confirmed that Baylor would be refunding the grant to LifeWorks and that Provost Randall O’Brien concurred with this decision.
(8) On Thursday (12.07.06) Robert Marks and another distinguished professor of engineering at Baylor, Walter Bradley, met with Dean Kelley in one last effort to persuade him not to pull the plug on my appointment (earlier in the week they had written forceful detailed letters urging that I be permitted to remain in the engineering school). The “technicality” that had been missed in the processing of the grant was at this meeting finally divulged: Dean Kelley and Jim Farison (the head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering) had not been properly notified that I would be joining the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. But they had not raised any objection the whole prior month (my name and title were prominently displayed on my office door as well as in front of the suite of offices of which it was a part). Moreover, when Robert Marks offered to “reprocess” the grant, Dean Kelley informed him that this was not an option and that I was too great a “liability” for Baylor. He did not elaborate on why I would be a “liability.”
(9) On Friday (12.08.06) Baylor claimed finally to have found a good reason to remove me, namely, a policy that forbids postdocs from having full outside employment (which I do with my job at Southwestern Seminary). On examining the BUPP (Baylor University Personnel Policy and Procedures — http://www3.baylor.edu/BUPP), one finds no such policy. Regardless, whether this was a formal or informal policy, the president of the university had signed off on a grant which listed me as a third-party beneficiary. The university had a legal obligation to honor its commitments (my attorney indicated that I could sue Baylor it didn’t). Instead, the university decided to return the money for the grant simply so that I would no longer be associated with Baylor.
(10) Later on Friday (12.08.06) I received an email from Dean Kelley indicating that he needed to talk to me about clearing my desk and returning my keys. I asked him to send me a formal letter to indicate when my appointment officially ends and the reasons for its ending — I received such a letter as an email Monday, 12.11.06, stating that I had been terminated Friday 12.08.06 but giving no reasons for my termination.
(11) On Saturday (12.09.06), prior to any official notification that my position with Baylor was over, my Baylor ID card no longer worked to take my family to the cafeteria. Also, on that day, my Baylor email address (William_Dembski@baylor.edu), which had worked since 1999 (it had never zeroed out even in my year-long absence from Baylor since June of 2005) now yielded the following response to people who attempted to send email to it: “Recipient address rejected: Account Disabled.” I had been erased.
(12) Sometime in December or January, Baylor sent back to the LifeWorks Foundation the entire amount of the grant that Robert Marks had procured for me to work with him. Question: Has Baylor throughout its history ever returned grant money and, if so, under what circumstances?
(posted by Denyse O’Leary for Bill Dembski)
And the Disinformation Institute is battling for science! For free expression in science and against censorship!
Ha! That'll be a first. They are pushing creation "science" (whoops, intelligent design) and both are dishonest attempts to sneak religious belief into science classes and fool the gullible. Both are the antithesis of science.
If they are so committed to science, why are they hiring lawyers and PR flacks? What is their research budget? Where are their laboratories? What peer-reviewed articles have they submitted? What a joke!
The Disinformation Institute's cover was blown by the Wedge Strategy when that was leaked. But they have been following it "faithfully" ever since, all the while disavowing it.
(Let me know when they make a "discovery" other than that which P.T. Barnum is widely credited with--but David Hannum actually said.)
Then publish the "scientific support" in proper detail before discussion. If the ID kooks want to be scientists, then they should do some science.
Baylor is a Southern Baptist university, isn’t it?
There were several research proposals and plans on the pipeline which were presented on this site:
www.evolutionaryinformatics.org.
Unfortuantely it was taken down yesterday.
Yes Baylor is a Baptist University.
Given that Baylor has stated clearly where it stands, let’s hope that Dr. Marks moves beyond victimhood and continues his groundbreaking work on his own. That is the correct response to Baylor. Show them what they chose to forgo!
Oh well, tomorrow’s another day.
It’s still there. I can still see it, anyhow.
My understanding is that he has continued his work, and the web site is still up.
Intimidation, suppression, threats, retribution - gee, didn’t scientists used to ridicule the church of the Middle Ages for using these techniques? Pot calling the kettle black, it seems.
You have to submit to “mainstream” journals in order for the scientific community to take you seriously, they say!
Yet, at every freaking turn, they shut down anything that provides even an inkling of possibility to address their demands…
Provide scientific evidence, not religious belief, and you will be listened to.
(Bill, is that you?)
And when research is attempted and funding provided, don't shut the work down like what they did ( again ).
Provide scientific evidence, not religious belief, and you will be listened to.
And no, this isn't Bill, are you Dawkins ?
How did you know which "Bill" I was referring to?
And no, I am not "Dawkins." I don't even live in England and I have never even read his writings. I practice archaeology and related fields in the western US.
When it comes to ID and creation "science" -- well, I was born at night, but not last night! Again: Provide scientific evidence, not religious belief, and you will be listened to.
This is very entertaining but I hope you don’t take this article seriously.
That biblical illiterates find religious kook grifters "cool", is nothing new.
If you are not Bill Dembski, then why do you plagiarize him? You have been asked about this several times.
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