San Jose Professor Fired for Answering Question about Genetics and Homosexuality

SAN JOSE, Calif., July 18, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A former San Jose City College biology professor is suing the college after she was fired for answering a student’s question on the relationship between homosexuality and heredity.
On June 21, 2007, June Sheldon, an adjunct professor teaching a human heredity course, answered a question about how heredity affects homosexual behavior by citing the class textbook and a well-known German scientist. She noted that the scientist found a correlation between maternal stress and homosexual behavior in males but that the scientist’s views are only one set of theories in the nature-versus-nurture debate mentioned by the textbook. Sheldon then explained that the class would learn in a later chapter of the textbook that homosexual behavior may be influenced by both genes and the environment.
The school launched an investigation after a different student in the class lodged an informal complaint that deemed Sheldon’s comments “offensive and unscientific.” Sheldon was later recommended for removal from the adjunct seniority rehire preference list and terminated by the district’s board of trustees on Feb. 13, 2008 (more)

Not Your Ordinary Wafer

A very disturbing link to a very disturbed associate professor at the University of Minnesota-Morris:
Our Salvo editor sent me this link today, and I confess that I was both horrified and amused by PZ Myers’ comments.
Because what’s sadder? The anger or the stupidity behind his arguments and indignation? While reading his rant, I sat dumbfounded at his ignorance and also burst out laughing a few times because his outrage seemed…utterly ridiculous.
As a Roman Catholic, I understand exactly why Catholics were appalled and upset by the young man who ran off with a consecrated host. Catholics believe in Transubstantiation, Mr. Myers. That boy wasn’t just waltzing off with a cracker – to Catholics, that is Jesus. We believe in Jesus’ real, actual, divine presence in the Eucharist as strongly as some people believe we evolved from apes, the earth was created by aliens or we are all one with nature through the mother goddess.
Are we to be denied our first amendment rights to hold such a belief? Must we be mocked and ridiculed for our traditions? How would anyone like it if his or her house was broken into and something precious was stolen? (more)

Just one of the many problems facing higher education described over at Salvo..:
…Last night I had the misfortune to sit through a 90 minute lecture on “Church” History that covered the time frame from 100 A.D.-500 A.D. I was induced to attend because my sister’s friend helped organize the talk and there was also free pizza and beer. Yet no amount of Home Run Inn Pizza or Coors Light beer could make the digestion of that talk go down in a pleasant manner. The professor stated at the beginning of the talk that she was going to “dismantle” what the audience thought they knew about history so that she could “build you up again” with the truth. The point of the lecture, as in, “what WAS the professor trying to teach us” is uncertain. But one “fact” that the good Ph.D. Doctor imparted was that Christians weren’t REALLY persecuted by the Romans, they didn’t really get killed all that often by the state, that only every 40 or 50 years or so would a Roman Emperor go on a killing spree, and that “no matter what the history books say” Christians weren’t really living in fear that they might get killed.
Now, the point of why I’m writing all this is NOT to get into a debate about the treatment of Christians in the Roman Empire. What struck me then, as it strikes me now, is that this woman, who has a Ph.D. and probably spent tens of thousands of dollars and countless hours of study to obtain her degree, managed to learn what exactly? What was the point of all that studying to come away from university with falsehoods filling her brain—falsehoods that are being imparted on her students. ... (more)