The Baylor administration, in attempting to justify its censorship of Prof. Robert Marks and his Evolutionary Informatics Lab, is now raising procedural concerns about the proper deployment of labs and groups on the Baylor server as well as doubts about Prof. Marks’s job performance. This is unconscionable. As I have pointed out here at UD, Prof. Marks and others continue to have labs and groups at Baylor that have never received the Baylor administration’s official blessing. Moreover, the idea that “Bob needs to get back to his proper work” is ludicrous given that he keeps scoring major research grants (just one the other day from the NSF) and given that the people faulting him have never been awarded any research grants whatsoever.
To put all this in proper perspective, consider how this whole controversy got going in the first place. It started with Benjamin Kelley, dean of engineering and computer science at Baylor, sending Prof. Marks the following email (I share it here since Dean Kelley copied others at Baylor and had no compunction about embarrassing Prof. Marks with it):
From: Kelley, Benjamin S.
Sent: Friday, July 27, 2007 9:34 AM
To: Marks, Robert J.
Cc: Tucker, Cheryl; Hyde, Truell
Subject: Web siteBob:
I have received several concerned messages this
week about an interview and web site dealing with
evolutionary computing associated ID [sic].
Please disconnect this web site immediately and
Cheryl will arrange a time for us to meet immediately
upon my return. I am teaching in the I5 program
in Shanghai this week.Thanks,
Ben Kelley
Note that Dean Kelley makes no mention of official Baylor policy regarding labs and groups on the Baylor server. Rather, what he stresses is “several concerned messages” (to this day we still don’t know what those messages said or who composed them), a July 20, 2007 interview that Prof. Marks gave about that work (for that interview, go here), and some unstated connection between Prof. Marks’s work in evolutionary informatics with “ID.” That’s guilt by association in my book.