DEGREES OF FOLLY: PART VI by William Bennetta The first five parts of this article ran in

DEGREES OF FOLLY: PART VI
by William Bennetta

The first five parts of this article ran in "BASIS" in February,
March, April, May and July. They told how the Private Postsecondary
Education Division (PPED) of the California State Department of
Education, in August l988, staged an "assessment" of the ICR
Graduate School (ICRGS). The school is an arm of the Institute for
Creation Research, a fundamentalist ministry promoting the
religious pseudoscience called "creation-science."

The assessment was made by a five-man committee that had been
chosen by, and was managed by, a PPED officer named Roy W. Steeves.
The committee included two ringers -- George F. Howe and G. Edwin
Miller  -- who had been linked closely to the ICR or to the ICR's
president, Henry Morris. The committee produced a false, misleading
report that concealed the real nature of the ICR, promoted the
ICR's scientific pretensions, and said that the Department's chief,
Bill Honig, should approve the ICR as a source of master's degrees
in biology, geology, "astro/geophysics" and science education. 

Two of the committee's legitimate members, James Woodhead and
Stuart Hurlbert, then sent separate reports to Honig, telling the
truth about the ICR. Steeves -- writing to the PPED's director,
Joseph P. Barankin -- endorsed the ICR and urged that Honig should
grant the approval that the ICR wanted.

Honig, at least in statements that he gave to the press last
December, refused the approval. In January, however, the Department
drew back from that decision and began to negotiate with the ICR;
and on 3 March, Barankin and the ICR reached an agreement. The ICR
would revise its  curriculum, purging the "ICRG's interpretations"
from all courses that would count toward degrees. (The ICR claimed,
and Barankin evidently believed, that science courses purged of
interpretation would be like courses at accredited schools. I asked
Barankin, in a letter, whether he had had advice from anyone who
knew about science, but he did not answer.) To learn whether the
ICR had made the contemplated revisions, the Department would send
a new examining committee; one member would be selected by the ICR.

The new committee is now at work, and I shall tell something about
it here. I assume that my readers have seen the earlier parts of
this article.    -- W.B., 12 August

A QUESTION OF INTENTION

Did the ICR ever really intend to revise its "science courses" and
curriculum, excise "ICRGS's interpretations" from degree programs,
and (in the words of its agreement with the Department) "conform
the classroom lectures, course textbooks, and other course aspects"
to science courses at accredited schools? Documents issued by the
ICR may suggest an answer.

On 8 March, mere days after the agreement had been reached, the
ICRGS's dean, Kenneth Cumming, sent a letter and a brochure to a
prospective applicant for admission to the ICRGS. The brochure
conspicuously proclaimed that the ICRGS's "Purpose" was:
"Education, research, and publication in scientific and Biblical
creationism." (Both the letter and the brochure said that the
ICRGS's programs were approved by the State of California. They
told nothing about the events of 1988, nor did they tell that
continued approval depended on a new review by the Department.)

In June, when the ICRGS had begun its summer session and presumably
was running its revised and conformed degree programs, the ICR
mailed the June-July-August issue of its quarterly devotional
booklet, "Days of Praise". 

The back cover bore the same boiler-plate that had appeared on all
the earlier issues. It described the ICR as "A UNIQUE complex of
evangelistic, missionary and educational ministries," and it listed
the "ICR Graduate School of Creationist Science" as one of those
ministries. I speculate, then, that be ICR -- regardless of what
its agreement with the Department said -- may actually have
intended to continue doing business as usual, dispensing the same
old stuff.

SOMETHING DIFFERENT

In parts IV and V of this account, I told of the Department's
efforts to obscure and rationalize the fiasco of last August.
Department functionaries first had issued evasive, false or
misleading statements and then had simply ignored inquiries. In
early June, when I was writing Part V, they had failed to
acknowledge several letters that asked how G. Edwin Miller had got
onto the committee that Steeves had assembled for assessing the
ICR.

Later in June, however, the Department resumed answering mail, and
at least two people who had inquired about the matter of Miller
received a form-letter signed by Shirley A. Thornton, Bill Honig's
"Deputy Superintendent, Specialized Programs Branch." It said, in
part: 

     At this point, it seems irrelevant to discuss the
     relationships of Mr. Howe or Mr. Miller. The committee     
     on which they served has written its report and been
     disbanded. The final committee decision was to deny
     reapproval. . . . ICR is now in the process of taking
     corrective measures which shall be verified by another     
     qualitative review and assessment committee this August.

     Consequently, we are focusing our efforts on ensuring
     that the most qualified and impartial panel possible will   
     be selected for [the new assessment committee]. You have    
     my assurance that extra diligence will be taken to
     ascertain whether committee members have any affiliation    
     whatsoever with ICR or related organizations; if you have   
     any recommendations on how to do so, please share them     
     with Dr. Joseph Barankin, Director, Private Postsecondary   
     Education Division, . . .

This seemed to say that the Department was taking a different
stance. It was not admitting that the 1988 committee's proceedings
had been defective, but neither was it still trying to justify
them. And it evidently saw that the picking of the new committee
would demand care and expertise. 

THE NEW COMMITTEE

As I write this, the members of the new committee have just
finished their visit to the ICR. They were there on 7, 8, 9 and 10
August, and they now will give some weeks to the writing of their
report.

The members are: Christopher J. Wills, a geneticist from the
department of Biology, University of California at San Diego;
Richard E. Dickerson, chief of the Molecular Biology Institute,
University of California at Los Angeles; Everett C. Olson, a
vertebrate paleontologist from the Department of Biology,
University of California at Los Angeles; Lawrence S. Lerner, a
physicist and historian of science from the Department of Physics-
Astronomy, California State University at Long Beach; and Leroy E.
Eimers, from the Department of  Science and Mathematics, Cedarville
College. 

Eimers evidently is the member who, under the agreement between
the ICR and the Department, was chosen by the ICR. Cedarville
College is a Bible school in Cedarville, Ohio. (During a period in
the 1950s it was called Cedarville Baptist College and Bible
Institute.) 

I do not know why the ICR picked an Ohioan rather than a
Californian, nor do I know much about Eimers himself. Unlike the
four others on the committee, he is not listed in the 1989-1990
edition of "American Men & Women of Science"; and neither he nor
his college department is in the 1986-1987 edition (the most recent
one available to me) of "Directory of Physics & Astronomy Staff."

At least two of the Californians on the committee have had earlier
experience with creationism and can be expected to show some
special understanding of creationists and the ICR. Dickerson has
served as a scientific expert in two legal actions that arose from
creationists' attacks on science education in public schools, and
Learner was a member of the state panel that recently drafted the
new "Science Framework" to guide science instruction in the public
schools of California. 

The draft has been opposed strenuously by creationists, because it
lays strong emphasis on forthright teaching of scientific
information about the history of Earth and the history of
organisms. (See Diane Curtis's story "The Evolution Battle
Evolves," in the "San Francisco Chronicle" for 20 July.) Lerner
also has written at least two articles that dealt wholly or partly
with creationism, and I have had the pleasure of being the co-
author of one of them. (See "The Treatment of Theory in Textbooks,"
which ran in April 1988 in "The Science Teacher", the monthly of
the National Science Teachers Association.)

The committee is being managed by Jeanne Bird, who joined the PPED,
as a staff consultant, this spring. She is now one of the PPED's
assistant directors. When I talked with her by telephone on 21
July, she was cordial but reticent. She said that she held no
degree in science or in law, but she would tell no more about her
education. Nor would she say what kind of work she had been doing
for the PPED, or whether she had had any experience in managing the
assessment of degree-granting institutions.



SIDEBAR: MEET PROFESSOR JOHN

D. James Kennedy is a fundamentalist preacher who makes commercial
religious programs for both television and radio. His headquarters
operation, Coral Ridge Ministries, is in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
His enterprises include a daily, half-hour radio show called
"Truths That Transform".

On 10 May, that show offered an interview with Henry Morris's son
John. John Morris has worked at the ICR for some years and now
holds at least two jobs there: administrative vice-president and
"full professor of geology." One of his geological specialties is
discovering that humans and the great dinosaurs lived, very
recently, side by side. (See his book "Tracking Those Incredible
Dinosaurs and the People Who Knew Them", issued in 1980 by the
ICR's publishing arm, Master Books.) He also searches for the
remains of Noah's ark. 

The interview on "Truths That Transform" was conducted by one of
D. James Kennedy's associates, who asked: "What does evolution have
in common with the New Age and Marxism?" The putative answers were
provided by John Morris, who also promoted a religious video in
which he recently had appeared. The video is called "The Evolution
Conspiracy: A Quantum Leap into the New Age". After telling his
radio audience that there was no evidence for organic evolution,
and that "doctrinaire evolutionists are also doctrinaire atheists,
and most of 'em are Marxist," he tried to link evolutionary science
to the New Age:

     It's just -- you know, there's no evidence in the fossil    
     record that [organic evolution] ever did occur;
     scientific law shows that it couldn't occur, statistics     
     show that it's highly unlikely -- impossibly unlikely --    
     and so evolutionists, even, are abandoning this concept    
     of pure naturalism, of naturalistic evolution. What
     they're doing, though, instead of moving over into the     
     creationist camp, they're moving into another sort of
     evolution. Uh, instead of being naturalistic evolution,     
     they're -- they're saying now that these sorts of things    
     couldn't happen without an overriding mind, without a
     design. 

     But instead of attributing that to God, they're --
     they're basically saying that nature is alive, that
     Mother Nature is thinking -- that -- this is the essence    
     of Eastern mysticism. Uh, it's the New Age movement. You    
     would be surprised how much of the technical, scientific   
     literature talks about this idea that nature is alive,     
     that it thinks and it does this on purpose. . . . So the    
     New Age movement is very definitely evolutionary, and
     modern evolution is moving in the direction of the New     
     Age. In fact, they used to show the  -- the monkeys, you    
     know, getting bigger and bigger and turning into man.
     Well, now the drawings, they go beyond man into man in     
     a lotus position. My goodness, this is the essence of the   
     satanic world-view.

All this was news to me. I had not known of any scientific law
showing that organic evolution could not occur; I had not noticed
that scientists were flocking to the New Age movement; I had never
seen scientific drawings in which monkeys (or anything else) got
bigger and bigger until they turned into a man in the lotus
position; and I surely had not know that this was "the essence of
the satanic world-view." I hope that John Morris explained all
those things to the new visiting committee that the Department of
Education sent to the ICR on 7 August, so that the committee's
members could fully appreciate the work and intellect of the ICR's
"full professor of geology."    -- W.B.