Want tenure? Learn to love Charles Darwin. Want to keep your tenure? Work his name into your license plates. Want to keep your job? Never, never cast aspersions upon academia’s favorite butterfly expert.
“We need to caution young people and let them know there are consequences for expressing doubt about Darwin,” biologist Caroline Crocker said recently in remarks at the Family Research Council. “I’m going on 50, my career is over.”
“I can start over but for young people it can be devastating.” Dr. Crocker was fired from George Mason University three years ago for, essentially, teaching the controversy, as the liberals like to say.
She has two letters from the provost complimenting her for the high student ratings she received before the Darwin lecture. She has a few letters and e-mails from students who heard the lecture on Darwin and attested to her fairness in presenting the often-times contentious material.
“Students who are promising physicians cannot get into medical school if they question Darwin,” Dr. Crocker told the crowd at the FRC. “I went to Northern Virginia Community College from GMU but left there when administrators said, ‘She has to go.’”
“Someone at the National Institutes of Health told me I was blacklisted.” Dr. Crocker is one of the academics featured in the film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.
Narrated by writer Ben Stein,, the film follows the travails of intellectuals who learned the hard way that doubting Darwin is not a good career move. A U. S. House of Representatives subcommittee report that came out a couple of years ago reached pretty much the same conclusion.
“My lawyer was fired for representing me,” Dr. Crocker reports. Meanwhile, “articles that question Darwin do not get published,” she observes.
The Darwin Curtain extends beyond academia and effectively ensures that no heresies will be spoken against the apparently secular saint. “John Rhys-Davies was called by a famous writer and told that he could not narrate a film about Darwin called The Privileged Planet,” Todd Nordquist of the Discovery Institute said at the FRC event on November 28th.
The British actor, then did not lend his voice to the film that was based on a book by Guillermo Gonzalez, the Iowa State University astronomer. Dr. Gonzalez is another one of the doubters chronicled in Expelled.
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
