Intelligent-design creationist gets tenure at Ball State University

An article in The Star Press datelined Muncie, Indiana, today proclaimed, ‘Intelligent design’ professor earns tenure at Ball State. The professor in question is Eric Hedin, a physics professor who, as we reported in 2013, is apparently an intelligent-design creationist and once taught a course called Boundaries of Science. The class has, however, been canceled, and Professor Hedin has presumably been enjoined to not teach creationism in his physics classes. (No, my very dear trolls, that is not a violation of his freedom of speech.)

I looked up Professor Hedin and find that his research interests include “Teleology.” He has what seems to me a heavy teaching load, primarily General Physics 1 and 2, 5 mornings a week. I followed a link to his publications and find that he has a steady stream of publications in what look like respectable journals and conference proceedings. I did not see any papers that looked like they were concerned with teleology, and I presume that he is not surreptitiously teaching creationism.

The physics department at Ball State is blessed with 2 intelligent-design creationists. Panda’s Thumb reported, about 1 month before our report on Professor Hedin, that Gonzalez [is] appointed assistant professor at Ball State University, referring to the intelligent-design creationist Guillermo Gonzalez. Professor Gonzalez had famously been denied tenure at Iowa State University, presumably for failure to conduct an original research program and instead writing The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery.

A morbid curiosity getting the better of me, I looked up Professor Gonzalez in Google Scholar and also here. I do not know when he became a fellow of the Discovery Institute, but I noted no publications of interest after 2007, though he was a co-author of a book on observational astronomy in 2006. Like almost every other fellow of the DI, Professor Gonzalez appears to have produced virtually nothing since joining that institute.

But let us end on a positive note: The same cannot be said for Eric Hedin, and I must assume that his promotion and tenure are well deserved.


Thanks to Glenn Branch of the National Center for Science Education for the original link.