Portrait of a pseudoscientist
Nathaniel Jeanson, that incompetent “geneticist” who was employed by Answers in Genesis, has a new gig: he has been hired by Columbia International University as a visiting research professor. This is not a step up in prominence. It’s actually kind of a step backwards, but the creationists will crow about the words without recognizing the meaning.
A “visiting research professor” is often a prestigious appointment, but it’s not an effective research position — it’s more of an attempt to bring a big name into connection with a university, and possibly forge new partnerships (Note: Jeanson is not a big name, except to the intellectually impoverished creationist community.) I’d be interested to know what the quid pro quo here might be, because he’s not going to improve the reputation of CIU.
Curiously, if you read that announcement from CIU, there’s no reference to Answers in Genesis anywhere in it. They name-drop Harvard and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, but the noisy loud creationist/Christian organization that has been associated with him for years? Not a whisper.
It’s unclear what they are going to accomplish with this appointment. He is still employed at AiG, they don’t discuss what his teaching duties will be, other than just talking to students. This is purely an attempt to swap titles and connections, but CIU is going to do this without openly acknowledging AiG.
This is also not going to help Jeanson’s career. CIU is a private Christian college that used to be called Columbia Bible College. It requires a whole lot of fundamentalist bullshit to graduate from there.
There are seven doctrinal points which students must consent to as a part of their admission to and candidacy for a degree from CIU. These are biblical inspiration, natural separation of humanity from God, salvation by grace through faith in Christ, the historical doctrine of the Trinity, the bodily resurrection of Christ from the dead, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the believer, and the evangelical mandate to witness to the gospel of Christ. The doctrine of Premillennialism is officially held by the school, but students are not required to adhere to this doctrine. CIU requires all teaching faculty to affirm Premillennialism.
That’s a fake school. It’s a Sunday School with delusions of grandeur.
It’s a fake school that shares a name with an Ivy League university.
I was thinking the same thing. I am betting he is banking on people ignoring or missing the “International” in Columbia International University.
I thought a “visiting research professor” was a prof on sabbatical.
“Premillennialism, in Christian eschatology, is the belief that Jesus will physically return to the Earth (the Second Coming) before the Millennium, heralding a literal thousand-year messianic age of peace.” – Wikipedia
I’m familiar with the concept but hadn’t heard that term before. I have to ask which millennium? Two have past and bupkis. No wonder it’s not a requirement.
That headline implies Jeanson now works for the Trump Maladministration.
As a “geneticist”, he presumably knows something about the, ahem, kinky reproductive arrangements of algae, so he might be well suited for the assignment of calling in nuclear strikes from orbit on the Reflecting Pool.
At a real university, it’s often a professor on sabbatical.
@larpar:
It’s not really any particular ‘millennium’ by the standard calendar, just the idea that Jesus comes back to Earth and then reigns for a thousand years. This is the view that’s part of Dispensationalism, which comes along with the idea of the believers being bodily Raptured into Heaven before the tribulations, Left Behind, and so on. It’s primarily though not completely a U.S. thing, having grown out of things like Darby and the Scofield Reference Bible and their attempts at a ‘literal’ reading of Revelations. There are also numerous factions within that group debating on when exactly the clock starts ticking. Pretty much all of the obsession with the Rapture and the End of the World (that is truly coming within your lifetime, so be ready!) is from this group.
There’s also Postmillennialism, in which Jesus rules in Heaven and the Church rules on Earth for a thousand years before the Second Coming. And most of the big churches are actually amillennialists, which treat the ‘thousand year’ rule as a metaphor.
A lot of it is the modern version of ‘how many angels can dance on the head of a pin’, except louder and even more acrimonious, because each of the various factions of Dispensationalist interpretations is headed by somebody who’s put his name and ego on the line with it, folks like Hal Lindsay or Tim LaHaye. (And Tim LaHaye was also a member of the John Birch Society, so all that horribleness got included in his interpretation as well.) So arguments between these folks can get very personal.
That’s probably the real reason they don’t ‘require’ Premillennial statements from the students: they’d lose too many potential students from groups like the sede vacantist ‘more Catholic than the Pope’ types who are fine with the fanaticism and everything else in that statement but draw the line at a Dispensationalist interpretation of the Bible. In other words, it’s a hypocritical business decision rather than an ideological one.
Each day the news from the US becomes more and more depressing. Doesn’t seem possible but there it is.
I wonder where else one would could call oneself visiting research professor with this pubmed record:
Adams GB, Alley IR, Chung UI, Chabner KT, Jeanson NT, Lo Celso C, Marsters ES, Chen M, Weinstein LS, Lin CP, Kronenberg HM, Scadden DT. Haematopoietic stem cells depend on Galpha(s)-mediated signalling to engraft bone marrow. Nature. 2009 May 7;459(7243):103-7. doi: 10.1038/nature07859.
Jeanson NT, Scadden DT. Vitamin D receptor deletion leads to increased hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells residing in the spleen. Blood. 2010 Nov 18;116(20):4126-9. doi: 10.1182/blood-2010-04-280552. Epub 2010 Jul 27.
Wang YH, Israelsen WJ, Lee D, Yu VWC, Jeanson NT, Clish CB, Cantley LC, Vander Heiden MG, Scadden DT. Cell-state-specific metabolic dependency in hematopoiesis and leukemogenesis. Cell. 2014 Sep 11;158(6):1309-1323. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2014.07.048.