Wesley R. Elsberry
Posts: 4991 Joined: May 2002
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Iowa State Daily article on emails in Gonzalez case
Quote | Gonzalez said he feels "not everything is on the up and up; not everything is kosher," and he felt pressure from inside the department "even before the petition was circulated in 2005, and all the more so after the petition." Concerning the e-mails, he said he was "surprised about what people were saying behind my back."
"Absolutely, I can say in unequivocal terms, that ID was a factor [for denying tenure]," Gonzalez said. "I guess I was being naive. I thought I was being judged on my full record."
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Uh, dude, you put "Privileged Planet" in your tenure dossier. IDC was part of your "full record".
Translation: 'Hey, I've shot myself in the foot! It's all your fault!'
Quote | John R. Clem, senior physicist at Ames Laboratory, wrote in 2005 that he was concerned about the possible creation of a "hostile work environment" by circulating an official statement and wanted also to "withdraw [his] name from any public statement."
Clem wrote that Gonzalez's statements were an "embarrassment" to the department and wished to instill in other members that Gonzalez's statements were just the "highly publicized views of one untenured member" of the faculty.
"I feel that publication of such a statement might become the most important piece of evidence in a successful court case to guarantee tenure to the person whose scientific credibility we should attempt to discredit," Clem wrote. "I think the best policy is just grin and bear it for the next couple of years."
Clem said he feels the e-mails being brought to light by the Discovery Institute are misrepresentations of the full story, as they are "on a fishing expedition to raise publicity for their cause" by "extracting the most negative comments" made by faculty to the press, thus facilitating their case against Iowa State.
"We had a very delicate situation [at the time], and we tried to handle it as delicately as possible," Clem said. "[The Discovery Institute] still came at us with guns blazing. It didn't do any good."
Clem said the decision to deny tenure to Gonzalez was "absolutely not" based on ID.
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Prof. Clem, one can't be too surprised that the Discovery Institute went with their primary competency.
-------------- "You can't teach an old dogma new tricks." - Dorothy Parker
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