DEGREES OF FOLLY: PART IX by William Bennetta Parts I through VIII of this article ran in

DEGREES OF FOLLY: PART IX
by William Bennetta

Parts I through VIII of this article ran in earlier issues of
"BASIS", starting in February 1989. Here is a summary: By law, no
unaccredited school in California can issue degrees unless the
school has been assessed and formally approved by the
superintendent of public instruction -- the chief of the State
Department of Education. 

In August l988, the Department's Private Postsecondary Education
Division (PPED) staged an assessment of the ICR Graduate School
(ICRGS). The ICRGS is an arm of the Institute for Creation
Research, a fundamentalist ministry that promotes the pseudoscience
called "creation-science." The founder and president of the ICR is
Henry Morris, a preacher and former engineer who poses as an expert
in geology, biology, paleontology and various other fields in which
he has no detectable credentials. 

The Department's assessment of Morris's school 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
who had been linked closely to the ICR or to Morris, and the
committee's report was bogus: It hid the real nature of the ICR,
promoted the ICR's scientific pretensions, and said that the
superintendent of public instruction, Bill Honig, should approve
the ICR as a source of masters' degrees in science and in science
education. 

Two of the committee's legitimate members then sent separate
reports to Honig, telling the truth about the ICR. But Roy Steeves,
in memoranda to the PPED's director, Joseph P. Barankin, endorsed
the ICR and urged that it should be approved. Honig, in statements
that he gave to the press in December 1988, refused the approval;
but in January 1989 the Department drew back from that decision and
began to negotiate with the ICR. 

On 3 March 1989, Joseph Barankin and the ICR reached an agreement.
The ICR would revise its curriculum, purging "ICRGS's
interpretations" from courses that would count toward degrees. To
learn whether the ICR had made the revisions, the Department would
send a new examining committee; one member would be selected by
the ICR. Despite the agreement, the ICR continued to advertise the
ICRGS as a "Graduate School of Creationist Science," devoted to
"scientific and Biblical creationism." 

The new committee visited the ICR in August 1989. Four of the
committee's five members are scientists from campuses of the
University of California or the California State University. The
fifth, evidently selected by the ICR, is from a Bible college in
Ohio. The committee is being managed not by Roy Steeves but by
Jeanne Bird. Bird joined the PPED in the spring of 1989, as a staff
consultant, and became one of the PPED's assistant directors a few
months later. 

Henry Morris and the other ICR men, according to their own
statements, expect that the committee will declare the ICRGS
unworthy of approval, and that Honig will follow the committee's
judgment. On 31 August, in an effort to win sympathy from the press
and the public, the ICR men held a "news conference" to denounce
Honig and to distribute a fiercely misleading account of their
transactions with his Department. 

They achieved only modest success, however: Most news organizations
apparently recognized that the ICR men's only "news" was their own
desperation. The committee has not yet given its report to Honig.
I recently asked the Department about the status of the committee's
work, and I shall tell here what I learned.  -- W.B., 14 December
1989

NEW ARRANGEMENTS

On 20 November 1989, Jeanne Bird replaced Joseph Barankin as
director of the PPED. Bird's title is "acting director"; she
presumably will manage the PPED through the end of this year, when
it will go out of business. (See sidebar.) According to the
Department's public-relations officer, Susie Lange, Barankin now
has a special assignment and works for Bill Honig's deputy
superintendent for specialized programs, Shirley Thornton. 

As a part of that assignment, Lange says, Barankin is still
handling the ICR case. Responsibility for the case, however,
remains with Jeanne Bird in the PPED, even if Barankin no longer
works there. 

WHAT'S TAKING SO LONG? 

Early on 4 December I telephoned Jeanne Bird to learn how the case
was developing. She said that she had to go to a meeting and would
return my call in the afternoon. The person who called me in the
afternoon, however, was Gregory Roussere, the Department's lawyer
who has overseen the ICR case and who accompanied the members of
the new committee during their visit to the ICR. 

According to Roussere, each member of the committee had submitted,
in August or in early September, an account of what he had observed
during the visit. Jeanne Bird then had directed the synthesis of
those accounts into a draft of the committee's report; and copies
of the draft had been sent to all the members, in mid-November, so
that they could offer comments and corrections that would be
reflected in a new draft. 

Further drafts will be generated until all the members reach a
consensus and sign a report that can be delivered to Honig. "We'd
like to finish it as soon as we can," Roussere commented, "but as
a reality, we probably won't have a final report until the first
of the year." 

Why, I asked, has the writing of the report proceeded so slowly?
The chief reason, Roussere said, is that the PPED has been
preoccupied with preparations for implementing some new legislation
that will take effect on 1 January 1990. That legislation governs
the assessment and approval of vocational schools.

TOPICAL STUFF

The ICR men, meanwhile, have just distributed another batch of
religious pamphlets, including the December issues of "Impact" and
"Acts & Facts". "Impact" offers an end-of-the-world piece --
"Earthquakes in These Last Days" -- by Steven A. Austin, of the
ICR's Geology Department. (For a note about one of Austin's earlier
ventures in pseudoscience, see "A Truth Patrolman Tracks Prof.
John," in "BASIS" for October.) 

Austin mentions the California earthquake of 17 October 1989, links
some biblical passages to earthquakes, and then tells how recent
earthquakes should be interpreted:

     Jesus Christ spoke of them as "signs" of His coming again
     to earth. He said, "There will be earthquakes in divers
     places" (Matthew 24:7; Mark 13: 8), a fact now verified
     by the global distribution of earthquakes recorded  on
     seismographs. Furthermore, He said this sign is the
     "beginning of sorrows" (Matthew 24:8; Mark 13:8). The
     word translated [as] "sorrows" in many English Bibles is
     the Greek [word] for "birth pangs." Just as we know that
     a woman is going to give birth to a child because of
     birth pangs, Jesus says we know that the intolerable
     anguish of God's judgment and the return of His Son is
     [sic] at hand.

Austin concludes that "our basis for understanding earthquakes"
should be this: They are divine devices for judgment, deliverance
and communication. An unsigned article in the December "Acts &
Facts" says that the California Republican Assembly (CRA) last
October adopted a resolution supporting the ICR' s attempt to get
approval from Bill Honig. 

According to the article, the resolution accused Honig of intending
to deny the ICR men's academic and religious freedom; it also
called for investigations of Honig's actions by the federal Civil 
Rights Commission and by the attorney general, among others. I have
not yet been able to get the CRA's comment about the "Acts & Facts"
piece.


SIDEBAR: SB190 IS NOW LAW

SB190 -- State Senator Becky Morgan's bill for reforming the
regulation of unaccredited schools that operate in California --
was signed into law by Governor George Deukmejian on 1 October.
The bill had been approved in the Senate (by a vote of 31 to 1) on
19 June. It then had been amended by the Assembly, which passed
the amended version (by a vote of 70 to 5) on 13 September. Two
days later, the Senate accepted the amended text (by a vote of 23
to 4); and on 20 September the bill went to the governor.

Since 1977 the responsibility for regulating vocational schools and
unaccredited, degree-granting organizations has resided, by
statute, with the superintendent of public instruction -- the chief
of the State Department of Education. Morgan's law will transfer 
that responsibility to the California Council for Private
Postsecondary and Vocational Education, a new agency that will come
into existence on 1 January 1991 and will be devoted entirely to
overseeing postsecondary schools.

Concomitantly, the new law will abolish the Department of
Education's Private Postsecondary Education Division (PPED) and the
Council for Private Postsecondary Educational Institutions, an
agency that was established in 1977 to advise the superintendent
of public instruction. It will not, however, affect the California
Postsecondary Education Commission (CPEC), an advisory body that
serves the governor and the legislature. A committee convened by
CPEC will prepare, by 1 October 1990, a forecast of the new
council's operating budget, including an estimate of any subsidy
that the council may need, from the state's general fund, to
supplement the fees that will be paid by regulated schools.

The council will have authority to establish "minimum criteria"
governing the operation of unaccredited, degree-granting schools
and to grant or deny approval to such schools. No unaccredited
school will be able to grant degrees, legally, unless it has won
approval. The council will begin practical operation on 1 July 199l
and will have 15 members: the superintendent of public instruction,
the secretary of state, a representative of the California Student
Aid Commission, six representatives of schools that fall under the
council's jurisdiction, and six people from the general public. 

(The text of the law adds: "It is the intent of the Legislature
that the members of the general public . . . have  a strong
interest in developing private postsecondary and vocational
education, and include representation from businesses that employ
persons in positions requiring academic, vocational, or technical
education.")

Any civil-service employee who may be working for the PPED on 31
December 1990 will become an employee of the new council; and any
school that may be holding an approval under current law will have
its approval extended "for a period not to exceed four years from
the date of the institutions's last approval review."

The new law offers a new opportunity and mechanism for policing
unaccredited schools and for driving bogus outfits from the state,
but it is not as potent a law as it might have been. One glaring
weakness lies in the composition of the council: Two-fifths of the
council's members will come from unaccredited schools -- that is, 
two-fifths of the regulators will be regulatees -- but none of its
members need come from ACCREDITED ones. 

Hence there is no clear, mandated link between the council and the
mainstream academic community, nor any clear, mandated safeguard
against the council's turning into a mutual-certification club. The
law's actual effect will depend on the integrity of the council's
members and technical staff, their diligence in resisting attempts
by diploma mills to vitiate the law, and the willingness of the
legislature and the governor to support the council with money. If
the council must depend entirely on license fees for its funds, and
must see its own budget shrink when it refuses to approve or
reapprove a school, then both the intent and the letter of the new
law may be compromised.   -- W.B.