Over in Texas they’ve just told the religious Institute of Creation Research they can’t offer a masters of science degree in science education. Meanwhile, in the UK, we’re busily dishing out degrees in a whole host of strange and rather unscientific subjects.
The Texas case has been building for a while. Apparently the state’s commissioner of higher education thought the ICR failed to show their degree met “acceptable standards of science and science education”. Even better, or worse depending on your outlook, it was “inconsistent with … rules which require the accurate labelling or designation of programs”.
Which is a nice way of saying it wasn’t science.
“Religious belief is not science,” says Commissioner Raymund Paredes (press release). “Science and religious belief are surely reconcilable, but they are not the same thing.”
The Dallas Morning News reports that what it calls the “Bible-based group” warned the education board it could face legal action for suppressing free speech. “We will pursue due process,” says Henry Morris III, chief executive officer of the ICR. “We will no doubt see you in the future.”
AP quotes him saying “It really wasn’t a surprise given the current climate of opposition that exists.”
In the UK, however, it seems we’re a soft touch for dubious degrees.
To tie in with their new book on alternative medicine, Edzard Ernst and Simon Singh, professor of complementary medicine at the University of Exeter and a science writer, drew up a top five of universities offering “bogus courses”.
The list, published today by HE paper The Times Higher Education Supplement, has Westminster University top, followed by Greenwich, Middlesex, Salford and Thames Valley.
In total they found 43 institutions offering 155 unscientific courses, including homoeopathy, traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture, and Ayurvedic medicine, in some cases as a BSc or MSc.
A spokesman for Westminster told the THES its complementary medicine courses “share a common core of health sciences, research and critical reflection, representing more than 50 per cent of the academic modules studied.”
And a spokeswoman for Middlesex spluttered, “It is difficult to see how anyone could consider the healthcare system of Ayurveda as ‘non-scientific’. People from India and Sri Lanka have considered it science for thousands of years.”
David Colquhoun, a pharmacologist at University College London who also worked on the list, has got hold of some of the teaching materials from one of the Westminster complimentary medicine courses. Gibberish is too kind a word.
I don’t get to say this often, but I wish the UK was more like Texas in its approach pseudo-science.
Image: mortar board / Linuxerist via Wikimedia and under GFDL
