Academic

HMM: Astronomer Sues the University of Kentucky, Claiming His Faith Cost Him a Job. In 2007, C. ?

By Glenn Reynolds

HMM: Astronomer Sues the University of Kentucky, Claiming His Faith Cost Him a Job.

In 2007, C. Martin Gaskell, an astronomer at the University of Nebraska, was a leading candidate for a job running an observatory at the University of Kentucky. But then somebody did what one does nowadays: an Internet search. That search turned up evidence of Dr. Gaskell?s evangelical Christian faith.

The University of Kentucky hired someone else. And Dr. Gaskell sued the institution.

Whether his faith cost him the job and whether certain religious beliefs may legally render people unfit for certain jobs are among the questions raised by the case, Gaskell v. University of Kentucky.

Regardless, this will likely be a major millstone around the University of Kentucky’s neck as it tries to oppose budget cuts in a legislature whose constituents are far more likely to identify as Christians than as astronomers.

UPDATE: Reader Michelle Dulak Thompson writes:

It sounds as though Dr. Gaskell thinks all that business in Genesis about the universe arising ex nihilo in a great burst of light isn’t all a bunch of hooey. Self-evidently you can’t hire someone like that.

There’s this nagging recollection in the back of my mind, though, of some other astronomer or two having something of the same idea. Only the name they gave it is slipping me . . . Large Blast? Great Boom? Something like that.

Seriously, the Big Bang was controversial when first proposed precisely because it did look a little too much like the Genesis account for some people’s comfort. It looks that this guy’s difficulty with the search committee was less about astronomy than evolution — but since the job he was up for didn’t have anything to do with evolution, they had no business raising the subject. Do they also ask every applicant whether s/he believes in the Virgin Birth?

He says he believes in evolution. But what’s funny is that they didn’t want to hire him because they feared bad publicity. Oops. Now they’ve got an article in the New York Times saying that he wasn’t hired because they worried that he’s “potentially evangelical.” That’s going to play well. In Kentucky. When budgets are being cut anyway.

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on December 19, 2010 (boomark / email).