Another publisher stonewalls on how he screwed up

That ridiculous article on Biblical diagnosis has been officially retracted, and the editor left a comment at Aetiology:

As Editor-in-Chief of Virology Journal I wish to apologize for the publication of the article entitled ”Influenza or not influenza: Analysis of a case of high fever that happened 2000 years ago in Biblical time”, which clearly does not provide the type of robust supporting data required for a case report and does not meet the high standards expected of a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Virology Journal has always operated an exceptionally high standard of thorough peer review; this article has clearly not met these thresholds for balance and supporting data and as such, the article will be retracted. I should like to apologize for any confusion or concern that this article may have caused among our readership, or more widely.

Whilst only ever intended as an opinion piece and also a bit of relief from the ‘normal’ business of the journal, the speculations contained within this article clearly would be better expressed outside the confines of a peer-reviewed journal. Biomed Central does not support any views outlined in this article.

Oh, yes. The usual “We always operate with exceptionally high standards, except this one time” defense. Anyone remember the Warda and Han paper that was even more egregiously ridiculous, claiming that mitochondria were the “missing link between body and soul”? That was also blithely retracted, with no explanation from the journal Proteomics about how the mistake was made.

This is a serious concern, to my mind. Scientists are expected to be open and communicative about their work, explaining all the details about how we achieve our results. Yet then we hand that work over to a publisher (usually a for-profit organization), where it is subjected to an arcane process cloaked in mystery that they call peer review. And every once in a while, some strange fluke exposes the inherently arbitrary and chaotic nature of that process, everyone asks “how the hell did that get published?”, and some guy in a business suit steps out to unconvincingly tell us “oops” and reassure us that all is well in the machineries of their journal.

I don’t think it’s enough. If a publisher wants to manage this profitable business of publishing science journals, there ought to be an expectation of transparency — a fuller explanation of how submissions are handled, and when mistakes are made, a more thorough explanation of exactly how it happened. Without an open explanation of how such mistakes occur, I can’t have any confidence that efforts will be made to correct the process that led to them.

And it’s not just the journals. Scientists have to have some expectation of rigor. The author of the retracted Virology Journal has also tried to explain what he was doing.

I was astonished that our article, submitted initially in the debate section of the journal, had stirred up such negative publicity. As an article for debate, there was no absolute right or wrong answer, and the article was only meant for thought provocation. Neither was it meant to be a debate on the concept of miracles. My only focus at the time of writing was “what had caused the fever and debilitation” that was cured by Jesus. I was especially astonished that so many comments were made outside the scope of the journal. In medical writing, colleagues would usually make comments in the “letter to the editors” and the authors would respond in the subsequent correspondence.

He’s astonished? I’m astonished! It was an epically bad paper, using very poor data to draw a completely unjustified conclusion. If he’s going to waffle now about there being no right or wrong answer, then he shouldn’t use the pages of a peer-reviewed journal to conjure up an unsupportable answer. Can this man even think scientifically?

I am amused at the protest that comments were made outside the traditional protected filters of the journal itself. That’s such a genteel expectation: that one can screw up royally, and then because one is a member of a formal organization, all criticisms will be processed and massaged by an editorial staff, one will have an opportunity to restrict and reply to only those bits that are properly phrased in a mannerly mannered manner, and that everything will be officially published in a way to enhance one’s standing as a respected colleague. Thus can pompous twits find perpetual reinforcement of their status.

Well, screw that.

The world has got to change for science publishing. No more ivory tower isolation, no more confinement of ideas to a narrow set of mutually reinforcing academic cronies — write something really stupid, and we have ways to drag it out into the light of day, where a hundred thousand people will laugh at it and tear it apart.

Now we know the price of academic freedom at St John’s University

It’s $20,000.

St John’s is a very nice, private Catholic college not too far down the road from us. They also have a program named after our celebrated liberal Minnesota politician and alumnus, Eugene McCarthy, the Eugene J. McCarthy Center for Public Policy & Civic Engagement, which has a Senior Fellows program to bring in new and interesting people to the community. So you’d think they’d be good guys; I’ve had a good opinion of them for some time. That’s changing fast.

One of the Senior Fellows they recently appointed was Nick Coleman, formerly a well-known columnist at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, one of those old school working class liberal writers with an assertive tone which, as you might guess, I liked, but which conservatives found abrasive. So far, so good: Coleman plus St John’s sounded like a good combination.

But then St John’s decided not to extend his contract.

Why, you might wonder. It’s easy: Coleman, popular liberal columnist, annoyed a few conservative donors to the school. One, Bob Labat, “a 1959 St. John’s grad who has donated to the school every year since”, thought Coleman was “grating” and “caustic” and “inappropriate” for a Catholic school.

Another, Len Busch, “who has given $20,000 to the St. John’s theology department each of the last three years” objected to the fact that Coleman dared to criticize corporations and our Republican sleazebag governor, Tim Pawlenty. Notice that his donations are exclusively to the theology department, which gives him the clout to dictate who can be in the department of public policy.

Labat and Busch announced that they would make no further donations to the university, and St John’s caved in. I guess donors to Catholic theology have bought out the integrity of the college.

Catholicism has compromised them in more ways than one. The university has an associated Benedictine monastery, which has a — can you guess? — history of housing pedophile priests. But then, we all just take that for granted at Catholic institutions nowadays, anyway.

NPR is a faith-based organization

I blame Barbara Bradley Hagerty — or at least, she is the face of religious inanity at NPR. She has a new piece up titled Christian Academics Cite Hostility On Campus, and does she have any evidence for this claim? None at all. Actually, she has evidence contradicting the claim.

There are two parts to the story. The first is someone who is fast becoming a usual suspect, Elaine Howard Ecklund, the person who studied faith among academics and was surprisingly surprised to discover that, golly gee whiz, nearly half go to church! This is a fact that is only news if you’ve bought into the biased view that academics are a monolithic bunch who are not only all atheists, but are also all communists, hippies, and Democrats. How the fact that a very significant minority of academics are religious argues that Christianity is oppressed on campus is a mystery.

So she moves on to pointing out that most of the religious academics are quiet about it; there’s a serious shortage of proselytizing evangelicals on the faculty. This, too, is a mystery to Ecklund, but shouldn’t be. Academics tend to be smart people. Evangelical/Charismatic/Fundamentalist religions are stupid. Figure it out.

Ecklund is also annoying because she is constantly harping on her thesis that higher education doesn’t erode faith, when the proper way to look at her data is to notice that more than half are freethinkers.

If you thought that was feeble, wait until you see the second part. They had to go looking for an evangelical Christian who has suffered discrimination for his faith, and who did they get? Mike S. Adams. That’s the most horrendous example of religious discrimination they could find? A far right lunatic who was tenured at his university but failed in his attempt at promotion to full professor?

Come on. Once upon a time when Christians complained about persecution, it was because a few of their members were getting fed to bears or getting nailed upside down to a stick…and now they’re reduced to squeaking about a college professor not getting a promotion?

I shall be looking forward to my massive pay raise

Zeno catches something amusing: a right-wing radio host ranting about professors.

Sussman:I get a kick out of— You go to UC Berkeley, you go to Stanford, you go to these various campuses and these students are out there protesting, “We need more money for our schools!” And standing next to them are the professors. “We need more money for our schools!” Hey, have you ever asked that professor how much money they’re making every year? These professors are all millionaires. They’re millionaires with big, big salaries and big, big retirement packages. And yet they dress like little schmoes, you know, with their crummy jackets [Officer Vic: Patches on the elbow.] that are twenty years old, yeah, and patches on the elbow. And their ties are askew and their hair’s kinda crappy and they drive crummy little cars and they’re millionaires. They’re all millionaires! And they actually have the gall to stand next to the kids who are protesting because their fees are too high. “We need more money for our schools!” So you can pay these millionaires!

Reality doesn’t matter to these guys, does it? We wear the crummy jackets and drive the crummy little cars because that’s what we can afford: professors are proud members of the middle class, not even the upper middle class. It isn’t pretense.

I’m also not really getting a pay raise. In Minnesota, we’re getting a pay cut this year.

Creationists are geniuses

Really, they are. A while back, the Institute for Creation Research moved to Texas, where they expected a friendly welcome, and instead they got spanked: their request to be allowed to hand out degrees was turned down by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. This made the ICR angry, and they made a wacky lawsuit. A genuinely deranged brief. Their minds work in very twisty weird ways.

They’ve gone down in flames — they are not authorized to give out degrees. But those creationist brains that scuttle sideways and inside out are not daunted by this mere legal restriction! Their website now proudly proclaims that they offer a Master of Christian Education (M.C.Ed.) degree. How can they do that?

11. Is ICR’s School of Biblical Apologetics program accredited?

Due to the nature of ICR’s School of Biblical Apologetics—a predominantly religious education school—it is exempt from licensing by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. Likewise, ICR’s School of Biblical Apologetics is legally exempt from being required to be accredited by any secular or ecumenical or other type of accrediting association.

That’s freakin’ brilliant. Are they offering accredited degrees? NO. The THECB refused to license them. But instead of saying that, they cleverly dodge the question. Imagine some poor gullible teacher suckered into getting a Masters in “Christian Education”, and then going back to her school administrators and waving her diploma around to justify getting a promotion.

“Is that an accredited degree from a licensed university?”

“They are exempt from licensing.”

“So it’s not licensed…is it accredited?”

“They are legally exempt from being required to be accredited.”

“So it’s not accredited.”

“WHERE’S MAH RAISE?”

Mike S. Adams, bad professor

The Supreme Court recently decided that campus student groups do not have to be subsidized by the university if they discriminate — so, for instance, the campus Christian club can’t refuse to admit gays and also collect university money. Perfectly reasonable, to my mind.

It’s driving flitterbrained conservatives mad, though. They can’t discriminate? Injustice! Perhaps one of the craziest is Mike Adams, who has announced his intention to abuse the ruling at UNC Wilmington.

…when I get back to the secular university in August, I plan to round up the students I know who are most hostile to atheism. Then I’m going to get them to help me find atheist-haters willing to join atheist student groups across the South. I plan to use my young fundamentalist Christian warriors to undermine the mission of every group that disagrees with me on the existence of God.

What a coincidence — I’m hoping to restart the UMM Freethinkers group this August, too. I can’t quite imagine bringing together students interested in atheism/agnosticism/secularism and telling them our plan is for them to join Christian groups instead, and become pests and troublemakers. That plan is just bizarre, and a disservice to the honest discussion of the issues…and a disservice to the students. Mike Adams doesn’t care!

That means an invading group can turn a smaller, weaker group into second class citizens on campus. That’s what I intend to do to those groups who do not believe in God.

This could get really interesting. It’s not just the students who’ll be annoyed; there’s this little thing called ‘collegiality’, where we have to work together with our fellow faculty. And those faculty may be advising some of those other groups. I can just imagine what would happen if I tried to turn freethinkers on campus into militant disruptors of other organizations: their faculty advisors would descend on me in fury. I might even suddenly find myself nominated and elected to serve on some of the more tedious committees on campus.

And here’s the kicker:

I do not seek robust debate. I seek power over the godless heathen dissident.

This guy actually works at a university? Madness.

By the way, if any Christians or Muslims want to join the UMM Freethinkers, they’d be welcome. We like debate. It would make the meetings lively.

It’s the faculty who define a university

Unfortunately, it’s the administrators who shape the faculty, and they too often lose sight of the purpose of their institution. Here’s Eva von Dassow trying to remind the UM regents of their job.

Uh-oh. Von Dassow is in one of those liberal artsy departments, Classics and Near East Studies at the University of Minnesota. Now somebody up top is probably scrutinizing that academic unit and measuring its revenue generation, which, of course, is the true measure of a scholarly endeavor.

(via Left of Centre.)

Honesty about sex is going to disqualify a lot of professors of Catholic dogma

Kenneth Howell was an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois. He is not being rehired at the end of his contract, apparently because he has been accused of hate speech against gays by a student. He had written an email to his students defending the Catholic position on homosexuality, and a friend of one of the students wrote to the university and the media accusing the professor of “hate speech”, of “indoctrinating students”, and “limiting the marketplace of ideas”.

I hate to say it, but I think the student was wrong. I read the professor’s email, and I don’t think it is hate speech at all.

It’s stupid speech.

A letter that condemned students, that threatened students if they didn’t agree with his views, that discriminated against a segment of society, or that denied people full participation in the culture for their views or background or private practices…that would be hate speech. This letter, though, is a pedantic and polite explanation of the views of the professor and of the Catholic church and of his interpretation of utilitarianism, and in fact is careful to say that he isn’t condemning any individuals. We can’t endorse using this kind of discussion as an excuse to expel people from academia — we want professors and students to be able to communicate freely with one another, without fear of retaliation. I see no sign that the professor was discussing the matter in a way that disrespects any of his students.

And the student complaining was doing so poorly. The professor’s ideas made him uncomfortable. He disliked what he said. He thought the professor was insensitive.

Those are not good reasons. If a student is never made uncomfortable, that student is not getting an education.

Bad reasons are given, but I still think UI made the right decision in not renewing this guy’s contract. Kenneth Howell is in ignorant fool who mistakes his religious dogma and his personal prejudices for knowledge.

Here’s an example. Keep in mind that this fellow is a professor, supposedly teaching college students something about philosophy. Here he’s trying to explain why homosexuality is wrong.

But the more significant problem has to do with the fact that the consent criterion is not related in any way to the NATURE of the act itself. This is where Natural Moral Law (NML) objects. NML says that Morality must be a response to REALITY. In other words, sexual acts are only appropriate for people who are complementary, not the same. How do we know this? By looking at REALITY. Men and women are complementary in their anatomy, physiology, and psychology. Men and women are not interchangeable. So, a moral sexual act has to be between persons that are fitted for that act. Consent is important but there is more than consent needed.

One example applicable to homosexual acts illustrates the problem. To the best of my knowledge, in a sexual relationship between two men, one of them tends to act as the “woman” while the other acts as the “man.” In this scenario, homosexual men have been known to engage in certain types of actions for which their bodies are not fitted. I don’t want to be too graphic so I won’t go into details but a physician has told me that these acts are deleterious to the health of one or possibly both of the men. Yet, if the morality of the act is judged only by mutual consent, then there are clearly homosexual acts which are injurious to their health but which are consented to. Why are they injurious? Because they violate the meaning, structure, and (sometimes) health of the human body.

REALITY, huh?

Here’s reality. A penis fits nicely in the hand, and a hand is usually better at stimulating the clitoris than a penis in the vagina, and our anatomy is such that our arms are of the right length to comfortably reach our genitals. Therefore, masturbation is a moral sexual act. We can extend this to point out that a man’s hand can stimulate a clitoris and a woman’s hand can stimulate a penis, and therefore, mutual masturbation, as is being practiced by tens of thousands of teenagers on this Friday night, is also a rightful act. There is no practical difference in anatomy or physiology between mutual masturbation between a heterosexual couple and a homosexual couple, so these acts are also entirely natural.

This reasoning can be extended to a great many sexual acts: oral and anal sex, frottage of various kinds, fantasy play, sadomasochism, etc. There are more aspects of male and female anatomy in which they are alike than in which they differ, and in fact the only act which can be uniquely performed by a male and female couple is penile-vaginal intercourse. So this one act out of many is all that this professor can point to in order to justify heterosexuality as the only proper interaction, but this requires ignoring the majority of human sexual behaviors. I have to wonder if all Catholic teaching permits in the bedroom is genital-genital contact. How sad for them.

Complementarity is also an invalid requirement. Men have lips and a tongue; women have lips and a tongue. It seems to me that a lot of heterosexual couples acquire a great deal of pleasure from kissing, despite the fact that the anatomy of that portion of their bodies is largely interchangeable (in an abstract sense, of course). Is this wrongful? Or are we forced to agree that the equivalent kissing between two men or two women cannot be judged by the nature of the act to be in violation of natural moral law?

I would entirely agree with Howell on one point: complementarity of the psychology of the two sexual partners is an important part of healthy sex. Unfortunately for his premise, psychology is not so strictly sorted with the genitalia; just as there are many women and even more men with whom I would be miserable and stressed to share a bed, there are people who have a great deal of difficulty finding the necessary complementarity of desire in partners of a different sex. This should be the most important criterion in a sexual partner, whether you can find joy together, and it’s often independent of all that meat below the neck. Although that stuff helps. And the brain often finds arousal in surprising places.

Howell’s ideas about homosexual practices are embarrassingly ignorant. He doesn’t know, so why does he profess to know? This myth that homosexuality involves taking the roles of man and woman is one of the oldest and silliest claims around — it’s not usually true (although it can be, since sex seems to throw out all our rules and expectations). Gay men are attracted to men, lesbians are attracted to women, not to clumsy impersonations of the sex they are less interested in.

Homosexuals and heterosexuals do not engage in actions for which their bodies are not fitted. If they don’t fit, they can’t do them. I mean, really.

The health argument is completely wrong. Many homosexuals will engage only in the kinds of activities that heterosexuals would call heavy petting — this obviously isn’t a problem. That good Christian homosexual, George Rekers, reportedly achieved arousal and orgasm from massage and a “long stroke” which did not involve extensive genital contact at all. And most of the sexual activities carried out by gay men are also carried out by heterosexual men with their female partners. You just can’t isolate gay practices as unnatural without also condemning a great many heterosexual practices.

Also, if we’re going to judge the rightness of a sex act by its health consequences, then lesbians are the most natural and moral of us all. They have the least risk of transmission of sexual diseases, do the least physical damage to each other’s delicate tissues, and are not going to get each other pregnant, which has incredibly deleterious effects on a woman’s health. In fact, the worst thing you can do to a woman sexually in terms of her health is for a man to put his penis in her vagina. Talk about violating the structure and health of a human body!

Of course, later in his silly letter Howell tries to claim that sexual reality is all tied up in procreation and cusses out that great Catholic evil, contraception. Again, he has a blinkered view of sex: some of the best reasons to have it are love and fun. But then, Catholics always seem to forget those.

I think it entirely reasonable to boot Kenneth Howell out of UI because he’s not very bright and doesn’t meet the intellectual standards I expect of UI professors. Of course, part of the reason for his weird shortcomings is the fact that he’s a professor of religion who is spitting up Catholic dogma, and one big problem is that a respected major university is offering courses in Catholicism taught by its adherents as serious philosophy, rather than teaching it as cultural anthropology by someone who can maintain a little distance from its weird precepts. Kick Howell out, but send the Catholic theologians packing right after him.

Boycotting Nature?

Wow. The University of California system is facing a 400% increase in the subscription cost to Nature Publishing Group’s journals. Libraries have been struggling with this problem for years, with journal costs spiraling ever upwards (usually it’s Elsevier that is leading the way), and it’s a tremendous chunk of university library budgets. UC libraries are currently spending $300 thousand on just the various Nature journals — increasing that expense for a university system that is already straining to keep up sounds like a nightmare. Of course, not getting Nature is also a nightmare to researchers…so now it’s nightmare vs. nightmare. Who will win?

UC faculty are planning a boycott. It may not be difficult to organize since the libraries simply cannot afford the journals, no matter how much UC opponents may want to keep them.

It’s a very weird situation because those UC researchers that Nature wants to bill more are also among the people who are providing the content for the journals, and also provides some of the reviewers who work for free to maintain the high quality of the publications. This is not to deny that the professionals who publish and edit at Nature Publishing Group aren’t an essential part of the institution of publishing, but honestly, science journal publishing has the most incomprehensible screwed up model for making money that you can find just about anywhere. It’s not just Nature, either — earlier today I was looking into an obscure subject in developmental biology, and found that none of the core papers are available under my university’s subscription plan. This system should be about making the scientific information that scientists generate freely available, and it rarely is.

Nature has made a rather unconvincing reply to the UC’s dilemma. I don’t know what’s going to happen yet, but science publishing is one domain where their producers are their consumers and their consumers are their producers, and it’s trivial to piss off your suppliers and your market in one easy step…and it looks like California could be the place to force a crisis.