School Says State Is Trying to Shut It for Teaching Creationism

The state Deparment of Education is seeking to close a small Santee graduate school because it teaches creationism as part of its master of science program, school officials charged Thursday.

The Institute for Creation Research, a private school that has issued 17 diplomas since 1981, will likely lose its right to issue any science credentials after a negative review by an independent academic panel, panel members and school officials said.

The shutdown would complete a crusade by the state Department of Education and secularist groups against a school that dared teach creationism along with evolution and other conventional scientific theories, said John D. Morris, the institute’s administrative vice president.

“We are fighting for our life because we presented more than a single viewpoint in our teaching,” Morris said at a Thursday press conference at the school.

The state’s top education official, however, said the graduate school is in jeopardy simply because its teaching of the conventional theories does not measure up to accepted standards.

“We don’t care. They can teach as much creationism as they like, as long as they also teach science,” said Bill Honig, the state’s superintendent of public instruction. “But course coverage, its quality of teaching, it just doesn’t measure up.”

ICR officials say such charges of sub-par instruction are simply a cover for those evolutionists who want to discredit and eliminate a resurgent strain of creationism from academia.

“Anyone even nominally familiar with evolutionary writings knows that many lifelong evolutionists are today abandoning evolution,” Morris said. “There is absolutely no physical evidence to support the theory of evolution.”

The state “sent over a committee of die-hard evolutionists who do not respect our right to teach creationism,” Morris said.

One panel member, Cal State Long Beach physicist Lawrence S. Lerner, acknowledged that the school’s teaching of creationism had indirectly hurt its chances of survival.

“We looked at many inadequate graduate theses, and some heavily used creationism in bending the rules of the scientific method,” Lerner said.

But he said the committee formed a negative opinion of the institute’s program based largely on such “nitty-gritty details” as the quality of the school’s courses, along with the quantity of departments (four) and faculty members (eight).

“When we (visited the school), we did find some shortfalls in its program,” Lerner said. “Creationism was not central to our evaluation.”

Five-Member Panel

The five-member panel, which includes one member nominated by the Santee school, will forward its report to Honig within a month, Lerner said, adding that it will probably recommend termination of the school’s master of science program.

The department of education has repeatedly offered to approve a program if the school changes its name to master of creationism science or to master of theology. The real issue at stake in the dispute, according to Honig, is truth in advertising.

“They are basically after intentionally misleading people, saying they teach science when they don’t,” he said.

But ICR officials said all of the courses offered at the school spend less than 5% of class time on the theory of creationism, and many don’t study it at all.

“What theology program teaches quantum mechanics or stratigraphy or biosystematics?” Morris asked. “These are not theology courses but strictly science courses.”

Honig said legislation passed in Sacramento in 1986 significantly expanded his department’s power to police academic programs. Until then, the state automatically approved all post-secondary programs, he added.