I don’t think this is the outcome which the Discovery Institute wanted.

Background information from PZ Myers:

Oh, dear. John West of the Disco Institute is in a furious snit because, after refusing to grant tenure to Guillermo Gonzalez, Iowa State University did promote Hector Avalos, of the Religious Studies department, to full professor. You can just tell that West is spitting mad that Iowa would dare to keep Avalos around, and thinks it a grave injustice that one scholar would be accepted, while their pet astronomer gets the axe. So now they’re going to do a hatchet job on Avalos.

After reading about Avalos’s books Fighting Words (2005) and the forthcoming The End of Biblical Studies (2007), I decided to buy both of them. The former should arrive on the twenty-fifth and the latter a few days into June.

Being the amateur hack that I am, I’ll write up my impressions here after I’ve read what Avalos has to offer. Until then, I’ll be finishing John Allen Paulos‘s A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper (1995). Short take on it, so far: it has its good points, but it’s not as solid as Innumeracy (1989, new edition 2001) and Beyond Numeracy (1991).