Academic Freedom

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UPDATE:  WE HAVE HAD SEVERAL FANTASTIC ENTRIES ALREADY.  BUT THERE IS STILL TIME TO POST AN ENTRY.  I WILL JUDGE THE CONTEST ON 7-26-11

A couple of  months ago a young university student contacted my law office seeking help in a dispute she was having with a university here in Colorado. [To protect my client’s privacy, I am using neither her name nor the name of the university. ] The previous week she had voiced opposition to Darwinism to her biology professor, who proceeded to scream at her, denigrate her religious views, and generally demean and humiliate her in front of the rest of the class.  After hearing her story I sent a demand letter to the university seeking redress.  Good news.  We resolved the matter on very favorable terms.

One of the terms we insisted on was a letter of apology from the professor. This is the full text of that letter:

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They didn’t make it into the film. Caroline Crocker, author of Free to Think and currently executive director of AITSE (dedicated to rescuing science from the mudslide of “science”), reflected in her book on discovering that she was not alone, that the Expelled were quite numerous:

There is companionship in troubles, and the more public my case became the mor others experiencing the same type of persecution contacted me and shared their own stories. Over 800 intellectually honest colleagues admit to seeing flaws in the theory of evolution and as a result many have suffered attacks on their careers and reputations. I was told of Nancy Bryson, a chemistry professor at Mississippi State University, who nearly lost her job for teaching the evidence for and against neo-Darwinian evolution to honors students, despite the fact that universities are supposed to be places for open inquiry and academic freedom. The university decided against demoting her only after her story was made public. In comparison, the case of the immunologist who lost his job after 30 years of stellar research has not been made public, simply because he still hopes to secure another position.  Read More ›

Claire Berlinski comments at Ricochet: “Seriously, if you could have seen how everyone scrambled to get out of the camera when I said we just want to talk about the interesting things we were talking about yesterday. And people are afraid. It would be the end of their careers.” Caption quote: “People who want to explore these ideas are as afraid of reprisal as anyone I’ve ever met in Turkey. (Excessively so, I’d say: It’s not as if anyone is going to lock them up. But obviously, something is keeping them from speaking freely. And that cannot be good for any of us.) ” The fact that the “land of the free” is governed by an unrepresentative elite is incisively Read More ›