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If you have an interest in science education …this is
from The Panda’s Thumb:
http://www.pandasthumb.org/pt-archives/001127.html
courtesy of Lynn Elfner, CEO of the Ohio Academy of Science
www.ohiosci.org.
We are not sure if this individual will defend
his dissertation in the near future.
Lisa
QUOTE:
ID vs. Academic Integrity: Gaming the System in
Ohio Posted by Richard B. Hoppe on June 7, 2005 12:44
PM Bryan Leonard is a recently visible figure in the
intelligent design creationism movement. Leonard is a high school biology
teacher at Hilliard Davidson High School in a suburb of Columbus. As an
appointee to the Ohio State BOE’s model curriculum-writing committee, he was the
author of the IDC-oriented “Critical Analysis” model lesson plan adopted by the
Ohio State Board of Education last year, and he recently testified at the Kansas
Creationist Kangaroo Court hearings. The credential that endears him to
the IDC movement is that he is a doctoral candidate in science education at the
Ohio State University, and his dissertation research is on the academic merits
of an ID-based “critical analysis” approach to teaching evolution in public
schools. Leonard was scheduled to defend his dissertation
yesterday, June 6, but we learned late last week that his defense has been
postponed. More below the fold. Here are the facts as we know them and some reasonable
inferences from those facts. The Graduate School of the Ohio State University
generally requires that a thesis defense be publicly announced. There’s
some question whether the announcement of Leonard’s defense actually
occurred. In any event, several members of the OSU faculty learned of
Leonard’s impending defense and of the composition of the committee that was to
conduct the examination. The entity that actually grants the degree Leonard is
seeking is the School of Teaching and Learning in the
College of Education. Within that, the Science
Education Ph.D. program requires that
Upon completion of the [candidacy] examination, the
student may reorganize the committee to reflect the expertise needed for the
dissertation. The dissertation committee must have at least three
members: two from the science education program area and one from outside the
science education program area. (Italics added) Leonard’s final dissertation committee did not meet
those requirements. It was composed of his advisor, Paul Post from the
technology education program area of the section for Math, Science and
Technology; Glen R. Needham of the Department of Entomology in the College of
Biological Sciences; and Robert DiSilvestro of the Department of Human Nutrition
in the College of Human Ecology. For the final defense an Assistant
Professor from the department of French & Italian in the College of
Humanities was also assigned to the committee to monitor the procedure.
Thus, there were no members from the science education program
area on Leonard’s final dissertation committee. What is more noteworthy is that there are no members
of Leonard’s dissertation committee who are specialists in science education or
in evolutionary biology, even though Leonard’s dissertation is specifically
directed at methods of teaching evolutionary biology in public school science
classes. The two senior tenured members of the committee, DiSilvestro and
Needham, in fact share a single salient qualification: they have both publicly
associated themselves with the intelligent design creationist movement in Ohio
and elsewhere. DiSilvestro is an original signer of the Discovery
Institute’s A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism
statement and testified for the Intelligent Design Network at the recent Kansas
Kangaroo Court hearings, as did Leonard. According to his departmental
profile, DiSilvestro’s professional interests are “Nutritional biochemistry and
clinical nutrition of antioxidant nutrients and phytochemicals, especially in
regard to inflammatory aspects of disease and exercise recovery; mineral and
phytochemical effects on weight loss.” According to a transcript of a
recording supplied by an attendee, DiSilvestro told the Kansas Kangaroo Court
that he doesn’t use evolutionary theory in his own research. Needham has testified in support of IDC proposals
before the Ohio State Board of Education. There is a department of
Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology in the College of Biological
Sciences, but Needham is not a member of that department. His research on ticks is only marginally related to evolution
and he does not teach evolution. (See here from one of his colleagues in Entomology.)
DiSilvestro was contact person for the Ohio Intelligent
Design Movement’s 52 Ohio Scientists Call for Academic
Freedom on Darwin’s Theory petition, and Needham was a signer.
Leonard’s Ph.D. advisor, Paul E.
Post, is primarily associated with technology
education at the Ohio State University and has no visible credentials in
science or science education. Post replaced Leonard’s first advisor, Paul
Vellom, who was a science education specialist, when Vellom left OSU. It’s
not clear why Leonard’s current Ph.D. advisor is not in his area of
concentration. As far as we are aware, DiSilvestro and Needham are the
only two faculty members of the Ohio State University who have spoken publicly
in support of Leonard’s approach to teaching evolution using intelligent design
creationist-based materials. (Judging from the model lesson plan Leonard
wrote for the Ohio State Board of Education, his materials are primarily drawn
from Wells’s Icons of Evolution.) The committee deck was clearly
stacked, and a “design inference” regarding the composition of Leonard’s
committee seems warranted. As Michael Behe tells
us The strong appearance of design allows a disarmingly
simple argument: if it looks, walks and quacks like a duck, then, absent
compelling evidence to the contrary, we have warrant to conclude it’s a duck.
Design should not be overlooked simply because it’s so obvious.
When several members of the faculty of the Ohio State
University brought these and other anomalies to the attention of appropriate
administrators in the Graduate School, the novice Graduate School Representative
on Leonard’s Committee, the assistant professor of French & Italian, asked
to be relieved, and was immediately replaced by Dr. Joan Herbers, Dean of the
College of Biological Sciences and an evolutionary
biologist. Shortly thereafter, Leonard’s dissertation defense was
postponed, apparently at the request of Leonard’s advisor in consultation with
the Math, Science and Technology Education section head. So what we have is a graduate student, by all reports
an earnest young man, who has been led down the garden path, seemingly guided by
a couple of tenured ID Creationist faculty members whose anti-evolution agenda
apparently overrode any commitment to the integrity of the academic process, the
value of graduate education and research, or the well-being of the
student. The phrase “cynical manipulation” comes to mind. Regardless
of whether Leonard was a willing participant in the exercise, the tenured
faculty members involved have a direct responsibility — to education, to
science, to their colleagues and university, and to Leonard himself — to
ensure that the integrity of the degree-granting process at the Ohio State
University is maintained. By participating in a loaded committee for his
dissertation defense, Leonard’s mentors demonstrated as clearly as possible that
they have no confidence in Leonard or in the academic worthiness of his
dissertation. Had it been otherwise, there’d have been no need to load up
his committee with ID Creationists who have no professional qualifications in
the subject of Leonard’s thesis research. That behavior is of a piece with
the IDC strategy of the last couple of years: fix the jury and you don’t have to
worry about the merits of your position. Sternberg
publishing Meyer, Sermonti publishing Wells,
the Kansas Creationist Kangaroo Court, and now the
Leonard affair, all demonstrate the same pattern of behavior: game the system so
the fix is in, and science (and education) be damned. This is emphatically not a case of academic
freedom. It is rather another example of academic carpetbagging by the DI
and its associated IDC zealots. Academic freedom entails academic
responsibility, and it is not apparent that Leonard’s mentors fulfilled their
responsibility, either to Leonard personally or to the academic world as a
whole. So Leonard’s dissertation defense is being held in
abeyance while the Ohio State University ascertains whether the processes that
are intended to ensure the academic integrity of OSU degrees are being adhered
to. The dissertation may be a perfectly acceptable piece of work, but the
apparent attempt to subvert the degree-granting process at the Ohio State
University makes that moot. One more time: the issue is the integrity of
that process and the responsibilities of faculty members, not the specific
student or his work. One hopes that in the end, Leonard gets an
appropriately constituted committee, one that not only satisfies OSU’s
requirements but also has the expertise to help Leonard correct any errors
introduced by the old committee and that can knowledgeably evaluate his
dissertation so his degree is not tainted and he has contributed something of
value to science education. RBH |
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