"Wedging creationism into the academy," by Barbara Forrest and Glenn Branch, appears in the January-February 2005 issue of Academe, the bimonthly magazine of the American Association of University Professors. In their article, Forrest and Branch discuss the attempts of the "intelligent design" movement to use academia as a base. In light of the scientific sterility of "intelligent design," they argue, "the Wedge needs another way to persuade education policy makers that intelligent design is academically respectable": by exploiting the academic credentials and affiliations of its proponents and supporters for all they are worth. Reviewing such Wedge tactics as holding pseudoacademic "intelligent design" conferences on campuses and recruiting professors to sign antievolution statements, Forrest and Branch conclude that supporters of "intelligent design" in academia "exploit their academic standing to promote the concept as intellectually respectable while shirking the task of producing a scientifically compelling case for it." Forrest is professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University, author (with Paul R. Gross) of Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design (Oxford University Press, 2004), and a member of the NCSE board of directors; Branch is the deputy director of NCSE.
January 19, 2005