Speaking of the distinction between consciousness and unconsciousness (a loose association to the item above), here’s Ellen Goodman’s Boston Globe op-ed piece on the Michael Dini case. Am I the last one to hear about this Texas Tech biology professor — as an aside, apparently a devout Catholic — who is being sued and apparently made a cause celebre by the Ashcroft Justice Dept. for religious discrimination by someone he wouldn’t recommend for medical school admission because the student would not ‘ ”truthfully and forthrightly affirm a scientific answer” to the question: ”How do you think the human species originated?” ‘ ? Goodman, characterizing this as “the sort of frivolous lawsuit you thought conservatives opposed, but never mind”, notes that
“conservative lawyers are now agile and nervy enough to hijack liberal arguments for their own causes. Kelly Shackleford, the chief counsel, actually compared Dini’s attitude toward a creationist with that of a racist. What if Dini refused to write letters of recommendation to African-Americans? Shackleford asked. ”I can’t imagine the university would say, well, that’s a personal decision of one of our professors and we’re not going to interfere. Discrimination on the basis of race, sex, or religion is prohibited.”
Needless – or maybe not needless – to say, Dini’s refusal to recommend a creationist for a graduate degree in medicine or science is not like refusing to recommend an African-American. It’s like refusing to recognize someone who doesn’t believe in gravity for a PhD program in physics. But creationists who believe that the origin of species is an open-and-shut book – and the book is the Bible – now accuse evolutionists of being narrow-minded.”
Of course it is specious to make this an issue of intellectual freedom, as Dini’s detractors do. As Goodman concludes with acumen, this is symptomatic of the creationists’ and the dysadministration’s disingenuousness or cognitive difficulty in distniguishing belief from fact:
“If he is convicted of ‘discriminating’ against religion, surely every student can demand that a professor equate beliefs and facts. Next stop, astrology for astronomers? Feng Shui for physicists? Anyone want a recommendation? How about a lawyer instead?”
But there’s even more at stake. Writing references — of which I do alot — trades in the reputation and integrity of the reference-writer. It is a privilege, not a right, to get a good reference. If you don’t know me well enough to know what kind of reference you’re going to get from me, you probably shouldn’t ask me for a reference, because I don’t know you well enough to write a credible one. And, certainly, if you know you disagree with me on a criterion I have for judging your qualifications, I’m the last one you should go to for a recommendation unless you’re deliberately trying to compromise me because of our disagreement. We don’t yet live in a country where there is some ideological means test to qualify for a faculty position.
