ID Scientst Needs Your Help

When I submitted questions at the Darwin vs. Design conference in April, I volunteered my email address. Well, I guess it paid off, because I received an interesting email from Jay Richards today:

Dear Friend,

My longtime friend and colleague Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez needs your help. Please read the alert below and consider joining us in the fight for Guillermo's academic freedom.

Intelligent Design Scientist Denied Tenure at Iowa State University

Iowa State University has denied tenure to astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, co-author of The Privileged Planet, which presents powerful scientific evidence for the intelligent design of the universe. You can read about the situation in the Ames Tribune here.

This is a very sad day for academic freedom. Dr. Gonzalez is a superb scholar and his research has been featured in Scientific American, Science, Nature, and many other science journals. In fact, his published work exceeds ISU's required publishing by 350%. Dr. Gonzales has an impressive list of achievements including:

• authoring 68 peer-reviewed scientific articles;
  
• authoring a college-level astronomy textbook published by Cambridge University Press;
  
• spearheading research that led to the discovery of 2 new planets;
  
• building new technology to discover extrasolar planets;
  
• and asked to serve as a referee for a number of leading scientific publications.

Iowa State's decision to deny him tenure is a travesty, and the university should be held to account for its action.

How You Can Help

This is where you come in. There is something you can do to help Guillermo Gonzalez in his fight for academic freedom. The decision to deny his tenure is currently under appeal before the president of Iowa State University. You can call President Gregory L. Geoffroy at (515) 294-2042 or email him at president@iastate.edu and let him know that you support Guillermo Gonzalez and his right to follow the evidence wherever it leads.

Ironically, Dr. Gonzalez arrived in America as a child refugee from Castro's Cuba. Unfortunately, he seems to have discovered that the Darwinist ideologues in America's universities can be nearly as unforgiving as the Marxist ideologues of his home country.

-Jay Richards

Hmmm... I suppose that Gonzalez has "the right to follow the evidence wherever it leads," even if that means walking off the edge of a cliff (an apt analogy for the scientific merits of Intelligent Design argumentation), but he doesn't have the right to do it while tenured to the State's teat unless the State says so.