stevestory
Posts: 13407
Joined: Oct. 2005
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Holy crap. Avalos's post linked to above is forthright and plain, and has a brutal effect on UD's stupid attemps to smear him:
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Hello, Dr. Dembski,
Thanks for your post in which you “concede” that Mercury might have had the designation that I cited. Indeed, in 1998, that is how Mercury sub-titled itself, and I was only trying to be as complete and accurate as possible in citing it.
What else was I supposed to do when that is how Mercury described itself in 1998?
To answer your other question, let me say that I was not just honest in how I listed that publication on my CV, but I was MORE than honest.
On my official CV, I classified “Heavenly Conflicts” under “other” or as an article in a “semi-popular publication” despite the fact that Mercury has “journal” in its own subtitle. But I had to cite the name of the publication accurately and completely, nonetheless.
I know that my article was not “peer-reviewed,” and so I was honest enough to say that it passed editorial review. So why chide me for being honest?
But passing editorial review by an editor who is an astronomer should be a credit to an author who is not an astronomer. After all, The Privileged Planet is published by Regnery Press, which is not even a science press at all.
Insofar as whether my article in Mercury was considered for my tenure case. The answer is definitely NO. My tenure file with actual publications was submitted in the fall of 1997, BEFORE that article in Mercury was published in 1998. That article, if at all, would have been cited as work in progress, in the fall of 1997.
When going for promotion to full professor, that article was not listed as part of my refereed publications, but again as either “other” or as an article in semi-popular publications. Again, I claimed nothing more for it than honesty demanded.
And your co-bloggers, who seem bent on comparing my citation and article counts to those of Dr. Gonzalez really seem misinformed about how different the fields of religious/biblical studies are from Astronomy.
Citation counts are not how we are judged in biblical studies. Refereed articles may count more in Astronomy than books. Books count for a lot in biblical/religious studies.
I had 5 books (4 solely authored, and one edited) since I received tenure. I believe that is the most books ever published by any associate professor in my department at the time such an associate professor was promoted to full professor.
Nor are big grants expected of biblical scholars, or of many scholars in the humanities.
The impact of our work, especially books, is judged by other scholars and reviewers in order to measure someone’s status in our fields, one of which is, for me, health care in the ancient Near East.
In assessing my status in this area of inquiry, it is perhaps best to begin not with my own words, but with the words of Mark W. Hamilton, a reviewer of my book, Health Care and the Rise of Christianity (1999), in the journal Restoration Quarterly (2001) p. 124:
“One of the foremost experts on ancient Near Eastern medicine and the author of a major monograph on the subject (Illness and Health Care in the Ancient Near East, [Harvard Semitic Monographs 54; Atlanta Scholars Press, 1995]) extends his research here into early Christianity.”
To be called, by independent reviewers, “one of the foremost experts” in my field is what is important in going from associate to full professor. An article in Mercury certainly was not the crucial factor, but one of those supplementary items that showed my range
of interests.
In addition, service is also weighed more in going from associate to full, and I had started an entire academic program (U.S. Latino/a Studies) at ISU at the same time I produced 5 books, refereed articles, book chapters, etc.
I also had won a Master Teacher award in 2003-04 in addition to the university-wide Professor of the Year award in 1996.
So I had teaching, research, and service requirements well covered.
In any case, your overall tactics in this tenure-denial case are certainly misguided. You should be concentrating on the field of Astronomy, not on persecuting a biblical scholar with such highly personalized attacks on my integrity.
You are not creating any more sympathy for the overall cause of ID when colleagues at ISU and in the broader community of biblical scholars see how
you are behaving.
In fact, you seem to be persuading even some of my past detractors to come to my defense. See, for example, the posts at Higgaion (“In Defense of Hector Avalos”) by a scholar with whom I have disagreed in the past: http://www.heardworld.com/higgaion/?p=621#comments
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