In the News

Russell Jacoby, a professor of history at UCLA, opines in the LA Times on why controversy should not always be taught in the university, and chimes in with an ID example. One interesting comment by Dr. Jacoby is that ID "is now mandated to be taught in five states and proposed in 20 others." Truth is, ID is not mandated to be taught in any one of the United States.

According to Jacoby, the jargon of choice and diversity actually corrodes academic freedom, which once referred to the freedom of college instructors to teach what they considered salient, subject to the review of their peers, not outside authorities. Today, it increasingly means the freedom of students to hear what they, or their parents want.

Using material from the Boston College Honors web site:

What is a Liberal Education?

The British playwright George Bernard Shaw once said, with more wit perhaps than truth, that a school is much like a prison, indeed worse since in a prison at least the inmates aren't forced to read books written by the warden and the guards. Well, you may have felt this way once or twice during the years you've spent in school, but a good education should have precisely the opposite effect. It should "free" a person, Aristotle thought, from the bondage of unexamined opinions, prejudices, and ignorance.

The American university in the late 20th century has become a supermarket of bewildering choices, reflecting the breakdown of agreement in our culture about what is worth knowing. In contrast, we in the Honors Program believe that there is no better foundation for an education than a solid grasp of the history of the debate--from Homer and the Hebrew Bible to our own century--about the perennial topics that have preoccupied men and women: the origin and destiny of our lives, human nature, the just society, the constitution of the physical world, how we understand our history.

But learning the wisdom of the past is not enough. An education for a constantly changing world has to be a training in a special way of thinking: one that leads you to see connections across disciplines, to notice what the tradition has valued and what it has neglected, to challenge your own conclusions and commitments, and to prize what can be learned from people different from you. But even this style of thinking will remain incomplete, unless you use it to develop a vision of a worthwhile life for you and your neighbors and to imagine plausible ways of achieving it.

This is the real goal of a liberal education.

"Teach the Controversy" makes a lot of sense after this kind of introduction to what college is suppose to be about.

Becky Bartindale and Lisa Krieger of the San Jose Mercury News report on the lawsuit filed by Larry Caldwell against operators of a University of California-Berkeley web site that is designed to help teachers teach evolution. Caldwell claims the site improperly strays into religion.

Defendants include two top biologists from the UC Museum of Paleontology, which runs the Understanding Evolution web site (http://evolution. berkeley.edu) and an official from the National Science Foundation, who is named because the foundation provided more than $400,000 in public funding for the site.

Caldwell says that amounts to a government endorsement of certain religious groups over others, and is an effort "to modify the beliefs of public school science students so they will be more willing to accept evolutionary theory as true."

Strange but Glenn Branch of NCSE says this action encourages a "climate of hostility", and yet the University of Kansas professor's new courses are just fine, with no victims apparent there. One word to describe that: hypocrite.

ID will make its way into a second KU classroom in the fall, this time labeled as a 'pseudoscience.' Sophia Maines reports in the Lawrence World Journal of the new class at KU.

John Hoopes, associate professor of anthropology, said the course focused on critical thinking and will teach how to differentiate science and 'pseudoscience.' Intelligent design belongs in the second category, he said, because it cannot be tested and proven false.

Oddly enough, Darwinian theory is also not falsifiable. Darwin's test of irreducible complexity can always be "explained away" by creative Darwinists. The highly elastic theory will always be stretched to cover whatever is found to be the case factually. Note, in some circles the move from gradualism, once thought to be crucial to the theory by Darwin himself, to Gould's punctuated equilibria.