What’s the opposite of education?

Plans are afoot to build a creation “science” education center in Henning, Minnesota — about two hours north of Morris. They plan to push the simple-minded literalist creationist claim that the earth is 6,000 years old and peddle the same BS that the Creation “Museum” does — it’s stark raving mad. These quotes tell the whole story:

The aim, Schultz said, is to provide families and young people with information they can use to respectfully question differing points of view they may encounter, like at school.

“What we’re finding is, many kids are subject to ridicule, lower grades, being laughed at, just because they lay forth different arguments and different interpretations of the same information,” Schultz said.

The Rev. George Sagissor, who is working to help create the learning center, said he ran into similar reactions when he attended the University of Minnesota-Morris in the 1960s.

He recalled one lecture when he said he politely raised his hand to ask a question from a creation standpoint and was asked to leave the class.

“We don’t get a chance to let our point of view be heard because we’re put down and we’re asked to shut up,” Sagissor said.

I am pleased to see that my university has a long tradition of dealing with nonsense appropriately. I’m sure that creations was polite in his questions, but I’d like to know more about the instructor’s response: I’m sure whoever he or she was was equally polite, and addressed the question in a proper way…and if the student was actually asked to leave, it was because he was being disruptive and a distraction.

Students should be subject to lower grades when they give wrong answers. Schultz is wrong, because creationists do not deal with the same information — they are selective, ignore all of the evidence that contradicts their claims, and give very, very bad arguments for their position. They invite ridicule; stupid is as stupid does, after all.

The claim of persecution is typical, too. Here they are, free to express their uninformed opinion, and even able to muster the money to build little echo chambers where they can babble about Flood Geology to each other, and they mistake the fact that real scientists are also free to point and laugh at the goofy superstitions of these wackaloons as evidence of oppression.

More reasons not to debate creationists

I’m going to be in this silly debate on “Should Intelligent Design Be Taught In The Schools?” with creationist kook Jerry Bergman on 16 November, sponsored by CASH and the local Kook Central. The latest hangup, though, is that the creationists want to have a pre- and post-debate survey, and they plan to give the audience these questions:

I think intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution in all schools, public and private.
Strongly Disagree Disagree Undecided Agree Strongly Agree

I think intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution by teachers who support it, without punishment.
Strongly Disagree Disagree Undecided Agree Strongly Agree

I think that as a minimum, the evidence against evolution should be taught alongside evidence for evolution.
Strongly Disagree Disagree Undecided Agree Strongly Agree

I’ve told them that that last question is simply unacceptable: it’s misleading, prejudicial, and begs the question. There is no evidence against evolution. If there were, I’d agree — teach it. However, until they can say something specific, I’m not going to let them get away with sneaking in a stupid loaded question to their audience ahead of time.

I explained that as is, I’d answer that question with “strongly agree”, because I think that evidence should be taught…but that I know they want to use it to pretend that there is some substantial support for teaching creationism, which is not the case.

Much waffling is going on on their part. I’ve put my foot down: cut the question out. They’re trying to weasel in some fuzzy alternative that will have the same effect. The first two questions are fine, they directly address the subject of the debate more specifically (that is, “Intelligent design”), but the last is just an open-ended bit of noise that they want to use to justify their anti-science agenda.

Dealing with these charlatans is aggravating on so many levels.

Shame on the University of Minnesota!

It’s disgraceful. During some football game, our mascot, Goldy the Gopher, mocked a player on the opposing team who thought it was appropriate to ostentatiously kneel down and publicly pray.

Now Goldy wasn’t the disgrace (I have a new-found respect for our goofy guy in a costume), nor was the young lady who came out and gave him a fist-bump afterwards. Hooray for them! The guy making a show of his piety…yeah, he’s a disgrace, but he’s not on the UM team. No, the real disgrace is our craven PR flacks.

Minnesota spokesman Dan Wolter says the stunt was “plainly a mistake” and the mascot didn’t intend to offend anyone or trivialize religion.

I call shenanigans. He was too trying to trivialize a religious ritual (although, admittedly, he wasn’t trivializing it quite as much as the clueless goon who thinks the almighty ruler of the universe will help him win a game), and we like him for it. I think it ought to be a Minnesota tradition to point and laugh loudly at any player who thinks he gets holy credit with a deity for catching a ball.

Greg claims it was me, but I know which of the two of us lives a lot closer to Minneapolis than the other.

You know, I’m just the guy who would run onto the field in subsequent games and make fun of the prayin’ — just to take the heat off Goldy, you know. I wonder if the opposing teams will demand extra security in the future?

First snow!

This could be ominous — we’re getting our first snowfall right now. It’s coming down wet and heavy, too.

I knew this was going to happen. I’d made arrangements for a contractor to come by and do some fairly substantial improvements to the insulation of the house — we’re having a couple of doors and a big picture window completely replaced — and I told them it would be highly desirable to have this done before the snow arrived…and they told me yeah, yeah, they’d be out within a couple of weeks. They said that two weeks ago. So I knew they’d never get here in time and that we’d have an early snowfall.

Sorry, Minnesotans, you can blame me.

Repercussions

Old-timers may recall that there was a little event last year that had a lot of people riled up — there were angry letters to me and my university, with frequent demands for my immediate firing. The university stood up for academic freedom, I’m happy to say, but there was one other concern. A lot of these letters had another kind of threat: they said they were not going to be making donations to UMM. I have several letters where people said that they had been planning to donate sums on the order of a million dollars, but because I was there, the money was going to go somewhere else.

That’s not good to hear. Like most universities, we’re always strapped for cash, and I know we have ambitious plans for building up an endowment. Adding up all these denials of donations, and comparing it to the standard numbers for the year, it looked like we would be getting nothing this year. Actually, it looked like we would be several millions into the negative numbers.

Strangely, though, we just got the figures for charitable donations to UMM, and they’re up 25% over the previous year, at a time when overall donations to the University of Minnesota system are down.

I have to think about this. Either this would have been an even better year for us if I’d kept my mouth shut, with donations up by several hundred percent, or…all those letter writers were lying to us. That couldn’t be, though — they were all such good Catholics.

Before anyone jumps to conclusions, I have absolutely nothing to do with the increase in donations, either. We’ve got a good staff that has been working hard to promote this great little liberal arts college in western Minnesota, and I haven’t been part of it. To be honest, they’d probably rather I wasn’t…

The inanity strikes home sometimes

I got a very annoying announcement on our university listserv today. Among the usual community and campus events, it says:

Please mark your calendars: Don Bierle, PhD in Biology, polar explorer, and former skeptic, shares FaithSearch Discovery at Morris Area High School Sunday, September 27, 6:30 pm. This event is sponsored by Stevens County Ministerial and area churches.

This really pisses me off.

Our local high school has problems. It’s underfunded, it’s academically compromised in many ways, and we were immensely relieved to get our kids out of there. It’s a small school, with a total of two science teachers, and one of them is openly creationist and openly dismissive of evolution in the classroom. If you want a good science education, Morris Area High School is not the place to go right now. And this doesn’t help.

Don Bierle is a creationist, a certifiable liar for Jesus, an evangelical, fundamentalist wackjob who is coming to town to lie to the community and to our kids. This FaithSearch program is undiluted Christian apologetics, and it’s going to be presented in our school building.

I called the school, and they gave me a runaround about how it wasn’t during school hours, and the churches were renting the room. I assumed all that; it doesn’t matter. This is a group promoting propaganda antithetical to the educational message of the public school. They are going to be teaching lies to the Morris community, and the school doesn’t care that their facilities are being used for this ghastly purpose. If it were the KKK asking to rent a room, there would be squawks and rapid backpedaling…but because this group is sponsored by a mix of our local churches, it must be OK.

It isn’t OK. It’s just more evidence that our theistically inclined brethren are happy to corrupt education and spread more ignorance through the area.

Any locals who happen to read this: if the school promotes this at all, if it’s mentioned in announcements, newsletters, or flyers; if our dear little creationist teacher, Mrs. Franey, even whispers a word about this dishonest performance in her class, I hope there are a few of you willing to spread the word and pound on the school hard. This is not the way to improve the academic status of our community. I also hope a few biologists and biology students attend, if it goes on, and puts a little public smackdown on this pious phony.

I’m also a bit peeved that my university sees fit to promote this garbage to our faculty and staff.