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William Dembski writes his own account of the start of this controversy based on his own experience.

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)

The Discovery Institute weighs in on this issue :

Academic Freedom Expelled from Baylor University According to CSC senior fellow and leading ID theorist William Dembski, what follows is:

“[A] big story, perhaps the biggest story yet of academic suppression relating to ID. 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's work at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, decided to shut it down simply because there were anonymous complaints linking the lab to intelligent design.”

Read on if you care at all about academic freedom and protecting the right of scientists to freedom of scientific inquiry.

What a difference a year or two makes. Or not. The ugly specter of academic suppression seems incapable of being dispelled at Baylor University. It first ghosted across the campus a number of years ago when leading ID theorist William Dembksi undertook the task of heading up an intelligent design research program at the Michael Polanyi Research Center. Anti-ID bigots amongst Baylor’s faculty and staff moved quickly and decisively to stifle any such research on their campus, claiming that they were concerned that “people will make us guilty by association and assume that we are associated with or linked to this organization that is very well established as a pseudo-science.” It was clear then that intelligent design was not a subject that could be freely researched, studied, or discussed at Baylor University. Academic freedom be damned.

Fast forward to 2005-06. Academic suppression and anti-science prejudice again surfaced at Baylor, this time in denial of tenure to acclaimed faculty member and scholar Francis Beckwith. ENV reported on Beckwith’s case at that time:

Beckwith has defended the constitutionality of teaching about intelligent design. Note: He has not advocated the wisdom of teaching ID, nor has he taken sides on the ultimate rightness or wrongness of ID. He has only defended the constitutionality of presenting the debate. The trampling of academic freedom at Baylor did not go unnoticed in the wider world. Indeed, Joseph Bottum of First Things responded with withering scorn: Baylor has apparently decided to sink back into its diminished role as a not terribly distinguished regional school. President Sloan is gone, the new high-profile faculty are demoralized and sniffing around for positions at better-known schools, energetic programs like the Intelligent Design institute have been chased away, and the bright young professors are having their academic careers ruined by a school that lured them to campus with the promises of the 2012 plan and now is simply embarrassed by them.

Fortunately for Beckwith, the decision was ultimately reversed and he was granted tenure, as he should have been in the beginning. But the writing on the wall was clear for ID proponents: Keep your views to yourself at Baylor or find yourself disgraced. Public pressure notwithstanding, academic freedom was all but absent at Baylor.

Unfortunately for Robert Marks, Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Baylor, he didn’t keep his views to himself. Perhaps he was still under the misperception that tenured professors and proven researchers could still pursue scientific inquiry without fear of institutional reprisal.

Suffering from a delusion of academic freedom last year, Marks decided that research related to evolution and intelligent design, specifically the informational generative capabilities of Darwinian evolution, could be an interesting and fruitful subject for scientific investigation. Marks teaches signal processing and imaging intelligence, his current research is on computational intelligence, fuzzy systems and neural networks, and he has a recently published book on related subjects published by no less than Oxford University. Tying together all of these subjects, one of his biggest areas of research and study is evolutionary computing, which has to do with emulating evolution on computers and is a robust and growing field of engineering.

Marks discussed the subject of evolutionary informatics in an interview conducted by CSC’s Casey Luskin on ID The Future back in July. He described evolutionary informatics as basically conducting simulated evolution on computers. For better or worse Dr. Marks mentioned that he was working with William Dembski on some of his research into information and evolution computing. Just mentioning Dembski these days at Baylor is grounds for dismissal apparently – or at least for dismissal of your life’s work.

Actually, Marks committed an even worse crime – he said he was doing actual research with Dembski. And worse, he was posting their research on a website about the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, at www.evolutionaryinformatics.org. (As of this writing the website is accessible -- it is now hosted by a third party and no longer under the administration of Baylor University..)

It should be noted here that Marks had received a grant from an outside organization that was administered through Baylor University to do this research. And that grant had been approved by the President of the University himself. Interestingly, the involvement of William Dembski caused Baylor to return the grant. Researchers familiar with the grant process will appreciate the significance of this. Recipient research centers seldom, almost never, return research grants for any reason. That fact that Baylor did so regarding a program of research related to intelligent design is quite telling about the University’s appreciation of academic freedom. One wonders what sorts of grants Baylor has administered without complaint for other "controversial" research in the past.

The punishment for Marks is that his ”lab” (we’ll get to that in a moment) was shut down and his website taken offline because the lab's research was perceived as being supportive of intelligent design. To recap, in June of this year the website went online. In July, ID The Future aired its interview with Marks about the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, and a scant dozen days later the website was erased from the net. Is academic freedom or freedom of scientific inquiry alive and well at Baylor University? (Journalist Denyse O’Leary has documented the exact timeline of events at uncommondescent.com, and has provided the backstory of academic persecution at Baylor.)

Dr. Marks has gone the extra mile in trying to accommodate any legitimate concerns Baylor administrators may have had about his evolutionary informatics website--even agreeing to put a disclaimer on the site making clear that it represented his views as a faculty member, not the university as a whole. But Baylor administrators have now spurned Marks' efforts to accommodate them, apparently reneging on a compromise brokered last month by Marks' attorney. Not only has Baylor deleted Marks' website about his evolutionary informatics research, its lawyer is now outrageously charging Marks with misconduct in creating it and implying that Marks has no academic freedom to pursue research in evolutionary informatics as a faculty member at Baylor.

Under pressure from the administration, Marks agreed to rename the project “Evolutionary Informatics Group” since calling it the “Evolutionary Informatics Lab” bothered anonymous complainers at Baylor because they said it connoted a physical presence. Of course, a “lab” in science circles often refers to a group of scientists participating in related research and collaboration at differing locations. Bickering over whether or not it was a lab probably seemed a silly thing to a researcher like Marks, and so he agreed to change the name. Of course, for the anti-ID thought police in Baylor's administration anything less than the complete annihilation of any research related to intelligent design wasn’t good enough. Changing the name didn’t go far enough. The work itself had to be stifled. After all, it’s not the name that is truly threatening, it is the research that can’t be allowed to progress.

Stay tuned for more about Baylor’s attack on academic freedom. The anti-science bigots were thwarted with the granting of tenure to Francis Beckwith. This current situation is a much more dire one for Darwinists and they are mounting a serious attack to censor scientists and stifle science.

...offered scientific support for Intelligent Design.

Then publish the "scientific support" in proper detail before discussion. If the ID kooks want to be scientists, then they should do some science.

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.

This is very entertaining but I hope you don’t take this article seriously.

Heresy must not stand.

One interesting aspect here is that Robert Marks’ data, research/methodology, and results aren’t being challenged...

Last time I checked, Electrical and Computer Engineering Professors is where I MYSELF am sure to go to get the cutting edge ideas in evolutionary biology.

Ok, I really don't. I go here...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

...and then I check out the Journal of Molecular Evolution and see what the many articles have to say.

If the guy wants to be a crank on a subject that he is not educated in or paid to perform or paid to teach- let him do it on his own time and not with the imprimatur of the college that did not hire him based upon his expertise or views upon the subject.

“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, in comments to the Southern Baptist Texan newsjournal Sept. 4

OFFENSE OF THE GOSPEL??? Anyone want to argue that Dembski isn’t doing biblical apologetics now? Or that ID is a Trojan horse for creationism. That quote gives the game away. What a DUMB-Ski.

Genetic algorithms, what?

Threadcrap at # 3

I remember working with Cantor sets.

Good times...

From his website.

Implications of Cantorian Transfinite Set Theory on Creation

I think the problem was where in Mark’s research where shows that Baylor’s football program is proof there is no God.