When asked for clarification from Steven Jones, Jim Foley gave two sources.
1. John Hafernik, the chairman of the biology department. Hafernik "believes"
Kenyon was "teaching" creationism. But according to the Wall Street Journal,
when this was brought up to Kenyon, he asked for clarification. He wrote to
the dean, Jim Kelley, asking if he was "forbidden to mention to students that
there are important disputes among scientists about whether or not chemical
evolution could have taken place on the ancient earth."
He was instructed by letter to "teach the dominant scientific view." Kenyon
replied he DID teach the dominant scientific view (no one disputes this), but
also discusses problems with that view and biological evidence which some
scientists see as evidence of intelligent design.
This time he received no reply, and was yanked from the classroom.
According to the reports, what Kenyon was doing does not seem to be the same
as "teaching" bogus young-earth arguments. Rather, he sought an open debate
about the dominant view. Phil Johnson puts it this way in RITB:
"Academic freedom does not permit a professor to neglect a subject he is
assigned to teach and present a different subject instead. It does, however,
permit him to express a dissenting opinion about the assigned subject, even if
it is an opinion that his colleagues and the academic administration regard a
irrational....Kenyon's advocacy of intelligent design was an opinion about a
subject already being discussed in the secular public forum, not the
introduction of a new and different subject." [p. 30]
Also, if Kenyon had been using his class to "teach" "bogus" theories, I doubt
that the faculty senate's Academic Freedom Committee, and then the full
faculty senate, would have voted overwhelmingly to return Kenyon to the
classroom.
2. Jim Lippard, who accuses Kenyon of using his classroom as a "pulpit" for
arguing against the morality of abortion. This is apparently based on second
or third hand sources (unspecified by Lippard). Such "hearsay upon hearsay" is
unreliable, especially when the charge leads one to believe that Kenyon spent
his lecture time "preaching" against abortion.
Indeed, such an accusation was never entertained by the faculty senate, which
voted to put Kenyon back in his class. Surely, if Kenyon was "preaching"
against abortion in class, this would have made it to the committee. So why
wasn't it?
No, we need more information than this before we can take seriously these
strong accusations.
Jim