Dancing On An IDEA’s Grave?

Not long ago Allen MacNeill, professor of biology at Cornell, wrote a blog post crowing over the apparent death of IDEA Centers around the country. IDEA centers are, or were, connection points for college students interested in Intelligent Design. By examining activity on their websites, MacNeill showed that the IDEA Center movement seemed to be moribund, and suggested that

like the “intelligent design” movement, the dodo was notorious for its stupidity and that [sic] fact that it is extinct.

Surely this represents a victory for opponents of Intelligent Design—or does it? Maybe it isn’t what it appears to be on first sight.

I have had no contact with IDEA Centers at any time, so I have no knowledge of what caused them to dwindle and/or disappear. For present purposes, though, that information is not important. Bear with me a moment and you’ll see why.

Let’s consider for a moment what IDEA Centers represent. At the most optimistic (possibly too optimistic) they were to be research groups for Intelligent Design. At a minimum, they are or were campus clubs, gathering places for interested students. Their viewpoint is a minority one, or at least one that college faculty members have discouraged, yet it is one that commands considerable interest throughout American culture, among persons of all levels of education.

Clubs of that sort are common on campuses everywhere. There are Christian groups, Jewish groups, Wiccan groups, atheist or “freethought” groups, and associations for any other religion you might name. There are chess clubs, sailing clubs, role-playing game groups, Societies for Creative Anachronism, Republican clubs, Democratic clubs, PETA, Marxist groups, and on and on. Many of these enjoy very little of the culture-wide interest that ID holds. Some of them—the politically-oriented groups, for example, or possibly some of the religious ones—are as roundly disliked by their opponents as ID is by evolutionists.

Now let’s suppose that one of these clubs, say, a Republican student group, were to disappear off the face of American higher education entirely, with no similar group taking its place. What kind of victory would that represent for Democrats? To keep this thought experiment running parallel with the IDEA Centers, we have to suppose that in the general culture, Republicans remained a large proportion of the population, but that their groups were gone from all of the colleges. What an odd situation that would be! Imagine a map of your state showing Republican activity in shades of gray: brighter where there is more activity, and darker where there is less. Everywhere the map would be gray, except for some very strange, totally black splotches on every college campus.

What would you conclude from that—that Republicanism is dead? No, you would ask, “What is it about these college campuses? There must be some Republicans there! What’s preventing them from gathering around their common interest? I can’t think of a single answer to that hypothetical question that isn’t frankly chilling: there would have to be some serious brainwashing going on, or else there would have to be something about the university environment that’s punishing Republicans severely for being open with their political views.

So I wonder about these IDEA Centers. MacNeill wants us to think that their demise means that ID is dead. He’s wrong. It’s not. It’s still a topic of intense, vital discussion throughout America. Depending on which survey you read, as many as three out of five Americans believe in God as creator in some way. Intelligent Design is alive and well in our culture. He must accept that as fact, even if he believes that as a theory of origins it has nothing to offer.

Now at this point I must be very careful to be clear about what I’m saying. I am speaking here of Intelligent Design as a social movement. ID supporters see it as considerably more than that, as a philosophical and scientific research program, while detractors say there is nothing there but the social movement. Regardless of one’s views on this, clearly it is at least a social movement, and to think about it with respect to its being a social movement is not to say that’s all there is to it. (I certainly do not think that’s all it is.) This post is not about the truth or falsehood of ID, but about the academic environment around it.

It’s about academic freedom, certainly. It might even be about more fundamental human rights than that. What MacNeill is boasting over is the death of ID as a social movement on every college campus in America—while all around these campuses, it lives. That has to raise the question, what’s killing it on campus? Can you think of any answer that isn’t chilling? (See comments 1 through 3.)

If you’re not tracking with me yet, imagine some Cornell prof gloating on his blog that every Jewish group on every campus in America has closed down in the last few years. Or every African-American interest group. Or every atheist group. Or every Christian group. Whatever that meant, it would not mean that Judaism, or African-American interest, or atheism, or Christianity had been stamped out throughout America. It would only mean that they had been stamped out on college campuses.

Stamped out. Jackboots come to mind. It’s not a pleasant thought. It never means that one side has won the intellectual battle. It means that one side has won a political power battle. As with our political thought experiment, there’s a good chance it means students know they’ll be severely punished for being open with their views. And why do you suppose ID opponents have felt it necessary to resort to such political power, when supposedly it’s a battle of ideas?

Well, I admit I’ve been conjecturing here, and I don’t know exactly what has put IDEA Centers out of business. I do know, though, what Professor MacNeill thinks about it. He thinks the demise of IDEA Centers signals the extinction of ID, and he’s downright gleeful about it. You get the sense that if he wasn’t personally responsible for killing the Cornell IDEA Center, he at least wishes he could take credit for it.

And just how seemly is it for a professor to dance on a social movement’s grave? Don’t you think that if he were to gloat about some other group’s death on campuses everywhere (atheism, Christianity, Judaism, role-playing games, whatever), somebody would notice he was being just a bit illiberal? When people like MacNeill call it a good thing to stamp out all instances of an idea’s expression on campus, the rest of us ought to call that out for the bigotry that it is.

And that’s what it amounts to in the end. It’s not a victory for ID opponents at all. ID as a social movement is as strong as ever. (The fate of IDEA Centers has very little to do with ID’s scientific and philosophical program, which is still not the subject of this post.) MacNeill thinks he’s boasting over a victory, but if my analysis is correct, what he’s doing instead is providing further evidence that Ben Stein and Expelled were right. No academic pressure against ID? Then why is this professor so publicly happy that one of its expressions is being wiped clean off the academic map?

In view of ID’s strength in the rest of American culture, it seems to me the demise of IDEA Centers may have a lot more to do with an idea being suppressed on campus than with it being overcome. If I’m right, then MacNeill might want to look back through history and observe what happens when people in power try to suppress ideas. No matter how many funeral services those power-wielders have held for “dead” ideas, many of those ideas have just kept on sitting up and walking right out of their caskets. People in power have often held dances on ideas’ graves, never noticing that the ideas were alive and well, standing just outside the edge of the light, looking on, and laughing at the dance.