Fogel speaks

This gets better and better. President Daniel Fogel of the University of Vermont has given several interviews on the Ben Stein affair, and clarified quite a few matters. He explicitly says he did not ask Stein to withdraw from the commencement ceremonies, but when you read these comments, it’s clear that that there was a lack of support from the UVM administration and that he was confronted with some serious objections, and Stein withdrew knowing that if he persisted it was going to get ugly. Here’s one interview with Fogel:

I think the fundamental concern of the people that wrote to me was that, while they are quite open to having a speaker with Mr. Steins views on campus, they felt that he should not be honored at the commencement ceremony when so many of his views seemed to be affronts to the basic premises of the academy, about scientific and scholarly inquiry and collaterally, people were deeply disturbed by his views on the roll of science in the Holocaust.

…

But I have to say, the issue here, and this is important, is not freedom of expression. Ben Stein has come to our campus to speak, and some of the faculty that are colleagues here wrote to me to say that they have no objection to him coming here to speak.

It was the legitimate concern among members of the community regarding the implications of granting an honorary degree to someone whose ideas fundamentally ignore the basics of scientific inquiry.

That’s a smart and important point: this was not about freedom of expression, since Stein clearly has a surfeit of venues in which he opens his tendentious mouth, but a question of a scientific research institution giving a science denier and propagandist a platform to validate his anti-university views. He reiterates this position in another interview:

“This is not, to my mind, an issue about academic freedom or the openness of the campus to all points of view. Ben Stein spoke here last spring to great acclaim,” UVM President Dan Fogel said. “It’s an issue about the appropriateness of awarding an honorary degree to someone whose views in many ways ignore or affront the fundamental values of scientific inquiry and I greatly regret that I was not attuned to those issues.”

Fogel just shot way up in my esteem…and ouch, that has got to sting Stein’s well-padded keester.

This poll is dead. Please let it rot in peace.

I’m getting a big surge in requests to pharyngulate this poll, Should the motto “In God We Trust” be removed from U.S. currency?. Stop, please. That poll is already blown to smithereens; just look at the numbers. Almost 11 million votes. The results are hacked, oversubscribed, and the product of massive flooding. When you see something like that, there’s no point in asking me to swamp the poll, because it’s done gone and sunk already, and is plummeting to depths that will make the Marianas Trench sigh with envy.

I like my polls fresh and tangy, ripe with stupidity. This one ain’t, although the stupidity is reekingly high, I will admit.

Cheerful news of the day

Doesn’t it just make you feel so darned good when you hear stories of megachurches and televangelists in decline?

Once one of the nation’s most popular televangelists, the Rev. Robert H. Schuller is watching his life’s work crumble.
 

His son and recent successor, the Rev. Robert A. Schuller, has abruptly resigned as senior pastor of the Crystal Cathedral. The shimmering, glass-walled megachurch is home to the “Hour of Power” broadcast, an evangelism staple that’s been on the air for more than three decades.
 

The church is in financial turmoil: It plans to sell more than $65 million worth of its Orange County property to pay off debt. Revenue dropped by nearly $5 million last year, according to a recent letter from the elder Schuller to elite donors. In the letter, Schuller Sr. implored the Eagle’s Club members – who supply 30 percent of the church’s revenue – for donations and hinted that the show might go off the air without their support.

It’s not just Schuller!

Today’s increasingly fragmented media landscape is also to blame, said Quentin Schultze, a Calvin College professor who specializes in Christian media.
Church-based televangelism led by powerful personalities filled TV in the 1980s, but now only a handful of shows remain, he said. Among the struggling ministries are those of Oral Roberts and the late D. James Kennedy of “The Coral Ridge Hour” TV show.

Ah, I dream of a day when all of the churches are in collapse. Unfortunately, the article doesn’t say that the loss of attendees is because of growing enlightenment: it’s because these organizations are dependent on the personal charisma of their leaders, and when they go, people just go searching for another happy sheep-fleecer. It’s still a start, though.

Looky here: a new Order of the Molly winner

The people have spoken, and the honored recipient of the Molly for December is…Nerd of Redhead! This, of course, merely confirms the nerdishness and raises it to new heights, so the nick is now even more appropriate.

Next, we have to pick some other nerd to get the OM after his or her name for the month of January. Leave your nominations/votes in the comment thread below.

The usual lies

The climate change denialists have been whooping it up in my email lately, crowing in triumph over the fact that James Hansen’s former “supervisor” has disavowed his work and claims there were no political efforts to suppress the scientific facts. I haven’t really cared — it’s an argument from imaginary authority, nothing more — but I was very amused to learn that this “fact” is in the same category as other denialist “facts”: it isn’t. This fellow, John Theron, is a cranky old gomer who retired 15 years ago, and was thus not even present in the oppressive Bush administration, and never had supervisory authority over Hansen at all.

I’m also sure that won’t matter at all. The myth of Hansen’s supervisor will be repeated forevermore.

Jonathan Wells’ weird notions about development

Jonathan Wells recently gave a talk in Albuquerque at something called the “Forum on Science, Origins, and Design”, a conference about which I can find absolutely nothing on the web. I wasn’t there, of course, and I don’t get invited to these goofy events anyway, but I did get a copy of Wells’ powerpoint presentation from an attendee. It’s titled “DNA Does Not Control Embryo Development” — shall we look at it together? It’s really a hoot.

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Darwin 200

A few of us wild and crazy evo people, including Richard Dawkins, wrote up pieces for an issue of the BBC Focus magazine. You’ll find me arguing with Steve Jones about whether evolution has stopped, Richard Lenski is highlighted, and Carl Zimmer makes an appearance. If you’ve got a flash player, you can read it online right now. It’s pretty good stuff, if I do say so myself.