Legislature threatens academic freedom

DAVID McNEELY

On Monday the Oklahoma House of Representatives Common Education Committee took direct aim at the integrity of science education in Oklahoma’s public schools, and thereby threatened the economic prosperity that Oklahoma so desperately needs.

Economic prosperity depends more than ever before on an educated workforce. Oklahoma seeks to develop industries built around medicine and today that means a substantial investment in research and development at the cellular and molecular level. Genetics is “where it’s at” in modern medicine, and genetics is a theoretical science.

The Common Education Committee attacked Oklahoma’s chances for developing an infrastructure and workforce in such areas through passing a cleverly named bill out of committee, a bill designed to inflict harm to science education in Oklahoma. The bill passed out of committee by a 8-5 vote, with seven Republicans and a Democrat voting for it, and five Democrats voting against it. House Bill 2107 was introduced by Republican Rep. Sally Kern; it is misleadingly titled The Academic Freedom Act. This bill is one of a spate of both House and Senate Bills intended to promote religion as an alternative to science in the public schools around the state. It sounds innocent enough to anyone not initiated to the ploys used by creationists to get their pseudoscience taught.

What the bill would provide if enacted would be for public school science teachers who teach that intelligent design and other creationists claims are legitimate science would be allowed to do so within the Oklahoma science curricula at all levels, without any disciplinary action or threat of loss of job. Thus, it purports to protect teachers who present what they claim to be a scientific alternative to evolution.

Academic freedom is a cherished, indeed essential, feature of schools, colleges and universities as workplaces. It is so important that colleges and universities award professors extraordinary job protection compared to what exists in other lines of work in order to make sure that faculty members are able, without threat of job loss, to investigate and teach freely. An important accompaniment of academic freedom, which is simply the freedom to investigate and teach, but is not the freedom to misrepresent, is academic responsibility. Academic responsibility is so important in the college and university that faculty colleagues and administrators wait six years, during which they subject junior faculty members to intense scrutiny and review, before awarding tenure. Tenure, contrary to popular belief, is not a guarantee of a job for life, but simply means that dismissal requires demonstrable cause.

As a member of a profession that places itself and is placed by society in a position of great influence, I as a professor and other teachers at all levels have enormous responsibility — academic responsibility. That responsibility is similar to the responsibility of physicians to practice honestly and honorably. Whereas a physician takes an oath to “do no harm,” I, as a scientist teaching my students, many who aim to be scientists themselves, have an unassailable duty to teach science correctly, for what it is. I cannot teach crackpot ideas as theories. I cannot teach that the earth is flat, that the moon is made of green cheese.

I cannot teach false theories. That would violate the trust I have with society, with my employer, and most importantly with my students and myself. False theories are not the same as failed theories. Prior to the development of the Theory of Natural Selection by Charles Darwin and his contemporary Alfred Russell Wallace, there were other theories that attempted to explain the phenomenon of evolution that many scientists were tentatively, and others not so tentatively, realizing was a part of the pattern of organic existence on earth. Among those explanations was one that predated natural selection by some 50 years, and was proposed by a French zoologist named Lamarck. Lamarck hypothesized that organisms transmitted characteristics they acquired during their lifetimes by exposure to environmental factors. By that hypothesis, a person whose skin darkened and wrinkled due to exposure to sun would be likely to have dark and wrinkled children — inheritance of acquired characteristics. That is a failed theory, but it contributed to progress in understanding evolution because it provided testable hypotheses that could allow scientists to winnow ideas to see which ones worked. Lamarck’s idea didn’t work, but it led to a great deal of research that uncovered important facts and principles that ultimately were included in the Theory of Evolution.

Intelligent Design is a false theory. It contains no testable hypotheses; it has proposed none. Intelligent Design is not science, and teachers who propose it to their students as science, and as a legitimate alternative to evolution, are violating the sacred trust they have with society, with their employers, with their students, and with themselves to practice academic responsibility, that all important correlate of academic freedom.

Oklahoma’s children deserve the best science education we can provide, and we have the money to provide well if we’re not forced to fritter it away on such foolishness. Our legislature needs to be intent on finding ways to better fund science education, not ways to bring it down.

Sunday was the 187th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, and ministers in 441 churches in 48 states celebrated it with “Evolution Sunday” sermons, in which they preached the importance of science’s discoveries as among God’s gifts to humanity. Acceptance of scientific conclusions explaining nature is not contrary to Biblical teachings, and the ministers made that clear.

(Comments by e-mail are welcome at dlmcneely@lunet.edu)

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