The Smithsonian has been sending mixed signals for a while now. They allowed the Discovery Institute to use their halls to promote an ID movie (at least they later disavowed any association), but refused to have anything to do with Flock of Dodos, and they aren’t going to endorse any Darwin events for 2009, the bicentennial of his birth…and then there was the whole ghastly Sternberg affair, in which we learned that a research associate there was a baraminologist, helping IDists get articles published. I love the museum, but something weird has been going on in the administration.
Get ready for more disillusionment. The director is a Republican appointee, and he’s been pursuing the Republican dream for a while now: no accountability, padding expense accounts, cronyism, junkets, wholesale looting. And getting paid almost $1 million per year in salary. Scientists don’t get paid that much—it almost makes one wish there were a way to get a Ph.D. in Bureaucracy.